This work by tirimid is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
NOTE: I am (at least for now) discontinuing work on this project. I'm creating a new personal text editor which will work differently. The below text has not been updated to reflect this.
medioed stands for (Medio)cre Text (Ed)itor. As the name suggests, it is a mediocre text editor for Linux systems. It doesn't have any particularly advanced features, but it is still perfectly usable for general, low-scale text editing. It builds to a standalone binary with no external dependencies in the filesystem. The idea behind medioed is to create a sort of "decluttered GNU Emacs" from scratch which supports only the features which I personally am likely to use. It's a project to create my perfect text editor.
Relative to other, more popular, text editors, medioed is fairly minimalist. Although probably not as minimalist as some people may like, since the only qualifier for whether something is added is my personal taste in text editors, rather than some consistent design principle.
medioed is free software.
Go to the GitHub. Clone the repository and enter the cloned directory by doing:
At this point you will need to have either mincbuild or Make installed. Mincbuild is the buildsystem I used for medioed. Actually, my desire to make medioed was a big reason I even created mincbuild to begin with. Anyway, once you have one of the two installed, you can build medioed.
Run:
... or:
... and the project will be built, assuming the compilation suceeds. If it
doesn't, check your toolchain and see if you can edit the mincbuild.conf or
Makefile to make it work.
Once you have built the project, you can install the medioed binary to
your system. To do this, run the following:
And if you ever want to uninstall it, run:
The default installation location will be at /usr/bin, and you can change
this by editing the install.sh and uninstall.sh scripts - or you can install
the binary manually if you have some kind of special procedure for it, since all
the scripts do is a file copy / deletion.
At this point, no more setup is strictly necessary.
The actual medioed program itself has no dependencies. However, for the
manpage viewer label integration, it opens a pipe to man using popen().
Nothing bad will happen if Man isn't present on the system - you just won't be
able to use the feature. This makes Man an optional dependency (although it
should be present on all sane Linux systems anyway).
After installation, you can run medioed in your terminal in a few
different ways. Either you can run it on its own, with no arguments, or you can
run it with an arbitrary number of arguments (which represent the files which
will be opened in buffers upon program startup). You can then also specify any
of the following options:
-c: Any files passed as arguments will be created if they don't exist. If
they already exist, they will simply be opened normally, as if the flag hasn't
been passed-d: stderr will be redirected to a file specified in the source code. By
default, it will be called medioed.log. This is only useful for development
and debugging changes made to the source code-r: Any opened external files will be treated as read-only and you will be
unable to edit them. This includes files passed as command line arguments and
those opened from within medioed using the C-x C-f keybind.And also -h, which will simply display usage information in a more terse
way.
Running medioed opens an interactive mode text editor in the terminal.
Medioed, being inspired by GNU Emacs, is modeless - unlike Vim. A lot of the keybinds are also based on GNU Emacs. Any printing character you enter (which isn't part of a keybind) will be written to the current selected buffer.
Files written from / read to buffers are assumed to be in UTF-8, implemented through the use of C locales and wide characters. Buffer editing is performed through wide character operations.
The editor has a system of frames and buffers. Buffers represent the underlying textual data buffers in memory - so when you read a file, it is written into a buffer. Buffers also store information like data source (file, freshly created, etc.) and a limited undo history. Frames, on the other hand, represent the actual visible "windows" presented to the user. Frames are bound to buffers, and are the thing which allow the user to interact with a buffer. Frames and buffers should have a 1:1 correspondence in practice, but are technically different. Frames store information like cursor position and syntax highlighting mode (local mode).
"Local mode" is just the name for the syntax highlighting settings. When
using Markdown syntax highlighting, you are in the md local mode. Local modes
are called that because they are local to every frame, and do not reset when you
switch between them. In the source, local mode "X" is implemented in
src/hl/hl_X.c, and made visible to the editor in src/conf.c.
"Global mode" is the name for a collection of functions which hook into specific editor events, like key presses or editor updates. Only one global mode can be active at a time, hence the name. When you switch to a frame which requests a specific global mode, the current active global mode quits and the new one initializes. In practice, the global modes currently only make use of the init hook, where they add their own mode-specific keybindings to the global set. These keybindings are used to handle indentation, smart parenthetical insertion and deletion, and in some cases other quality-of-life things.
In short: local modes are syntax highlighters, global modes provide programming language tooling in the editor.
Some aspects of the editor completely ignore the active global and local modes. These are: the prompt and the label. There can only be a single prompt or label active at a time, and the user interacts with them "directly", partially bypassing the usual keyboard input system. That is, when you issue C-f to the prompt, it prevents the main keyboard system from treating it as a bind. The only thing that the keyboard system still does is record the keypress for macro purposes, if macro recording is active.
To get a comprehensive list of keybinds, consult src/conf.c and the source
file for the individual global mode you wish to see (src/mode/mode_X.c). There
are also a few prompt and label specific keybinds which you can see
comprehensively in src/prompt.c and src/label.c What follows is a few
select, important keybinds a beginner user ought to know.
Much like many other things in medioed, the macro system is inspired by that of GNU Emacs. By default, a macro is not recording. To begin recording a macro, press F3 - now, you will see that, at the bottom of the screen, your keypress history will be recorded. Once you have set the base for your macro, press F4 to stop recording. When you are not recording, and if a macro has already been recorded, you may press F4 to execute it. Macro execution in medioed works by feeding the recorded inputs back into the keyboard system, as if the user has entered them again.
Try not to enter ridiculously long macros, as there is a limit on size (512 keypresses). Exceeding this limit will simply result in a truncated macro recording, with the end part missing.
This work by tirimid is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0