text.love

An editor for plain text.

Not very useful by itself, but it's a fork of lines.love that you can take in other directions besides line drawings, while easily sharing patches between forks.

Designed above all to be easy to modify and give you early warning if your modifications break something.

Getting started

Install LÖVE. It's just a 5MB download, open-source and extremely well-behaved. I'll assume below that you can invoke it using the love command, but that might vary depending on your OS.

To run from the terminal, pass this directory to LÖVE, optionally with a file path to edit.

Alternatively, turn it into a .love file you can double-click on:

$ zip -r /tmp/text.love *.lua

By default, it reads/writes the file lines.txt in a directory relative to this app.

To open a different file, drop it on the app window.

Keyboard shortcuts

While editing text:

• ctrl+f to find patterns within a file
• ctrl+c to copy, ctrl+x to cut, ctrl+v to paste
• ctrl+z to undo, ctrl+y to redo
• ctrl+= to zoom in, ctrl+- to zoom out, ctrl+0 to reset zoom
• alt+right/alt+left to jump to the next/previous word, respectively
• mouse drag or shift + movement to select text, ctrl+a to select all
• ctrl+e to modify the sources

Exclusively tested so far with a US keyboard layout. If you use a different layout, please let me know if things worked, or if you found anything amiss: http://akkartik.name/contact

Known issues

• No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.

• No support yet for right-to-left languages.

• Undo/redo may be sluggish in large files. Large files may grow sluggish in other ways. Works well in all circumstances with files under 50KB.

• If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get sluggish, you can lose data.

• Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.

• No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.

Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of lines.love, an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings. Updates to it can be downloaded from the following mirrors:

• https://repo.or.cz/text.love.git
• https://tildegit.org/akkartik/text.love
• https://git.tilde.institute/akkartik/text.love
• https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/text.love
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/text.love
• https://github.com/akkartik/text.love
• https://codeberg.org/akkartik/text.love
• https://notabug.org/akkartik/text.love
• https://pagure.io/text.love
• https://nest.pijul.com/akkartik/text.love (using the Pijul version control system)

Further forks are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.

• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/view.love -- a stripped down version without support for modifying files; useful starting point for some forks.
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pong.love -- a fairly minimal example app that can edit and debug its own source code.
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/template-live-editor -- a template for building "free-wheeling" live programs (easy to fork, can be modified as they run), with a text editor primitive.
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/luaML.love -- a free-wheeling 'browser' for a Lua-based markup language built as a live program.
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/driver.love -- a programming environment for modifying free-wheeling programs while they run.

Feedback

Most appreciated.