cursed-editor 0.5.0.20230918.235438

A Vim Inspired Text Editor Written in Pure Python

Cursed - a Vim Inspired Text Editor Written in Pure Python

Quickstart

Want to try out the editor without installing anything?

Just clone the repo and run ./main.py file_to_edit.txt

Like vim, press "a" or "i" to get into "insert mode".

Press control+s to save. Press control+c to exit.

Features

• Only dependency is the python standard library
• Supports some of vim's key bindings
• Very simple. No configuration.
• Doesn't appear to crash all the time ;)

Motivation

I've been a vim user for many years and while I do love vim, I wanted complete control over my text editor, so I decided to write one.

Support Expectations

While I am passionate about excellent software, I have:

• a day job as a software engineer (which I'm very lucky to love and enjoy)
• and a beautiful family (which I love more)

Therefore, it is natural that all those things are going to be a higher priority for me than adding features and fixing bugs to this project.

So while I am honored by the fact you are considering using this software, and I'm eager to hear feedback via issues and merge requests, I respectfully ask that you remember that this is a hobby project and that it will be supported as such.

So please do not be a jerk, and I'll promise not to be a jerk as well!

Design Decisions

These are some rules of thumb I'm trying to keep in mind as I write the cursed editor.

• Prefer a "clean" implementation over feature additions. I'm more interested in the long term maintenance of this project than rapidly and hastily adding features.
• Stick to the standard library. The fewer dependencies a project has, the easier it is to deploy. This may become a challenge once we start trying to deal with things like the clipboard, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

ideas for further development

Please see the Issues Page

Rationalle behind not supporting arbitrarily large files.

So I have determined that this program should NOT support arbitrarily large files.

Here is why: - copying the file to edit into a temporary location would be a huge cost of disk space - there is not a reliable way of locking files in a cross platform way when we have no control over what other programs may be accessing the file - doing the accounting and overhead of caching where linefeeds are located and where edits have been made is extremely complicated.

So my conclusion is that just loading the whole file into memory will be a lot easier, so we will not support files which can't fit into memory

Getting Started Developing The Cursed Editor

Setting up the environment.

I like to try to make it very easy to set up development environments for my projects. Currently, we have the following requirements:

• a linux/unix like Operating System
• poetry - https://python-poetry.org/docs/#installation
• and a python interpreter

Running the tests

After cloning the repo, it's best to get a baseline for performance and functionality of the application. Try checking out the main branch and running the tests by issuing the following command.

poetry run poe test

Or if you are already in a poetry shell, simply running poe test will do the same thing.

This project uses Poe The Poet (https://pypi.org/project/poethepoet/) to declare and run project related tasks. The test task does all the same things we check for during a merge request into the main branch.

Therefore, all the tests should pass (on linux/unix).

I do not currently own a mac and so I cannot be certain that this will work on a mac. However, I know that this will not work on windows for the following reasons:

• The windows version of Python does not include the curses module.
• The tests of application.py rely on the tty module of the standard library, which only works on unix.

Aside from this, however, if for some strange reason the tests fail despite being run on linux, It's proabably an issue.

Either something is wrong with the software, or the environment setup of this documentation is not accurate or intuitive. I'd be happy to help out if any issues are encountered at this phase.

Details on the checks run by poe test

For a listing of all poe jobs simply run

poe

Code Formatting

We currently use black for formatting, but in case we ever decide to change this running

poe format

Will always do the same format operation as the main branch of the repo.

Currently black . will also, work but if, in the future we move away from black, poe format will still do the "official formatting".

Lint checks

Currently we are using pylint for static analysis. I've written a custom pylint plugin for this project, and might write more over time, so I pretty satisfied sticking with pylint for now.

poe lint

really just does pylint .

The pyproject.toml file

This project make heavy use of the features of pyproject.toml, I'd prefer that all project configuration (pylint, coverage, black, poe, etc) stay in the pyproject.toml file if possible.