A small fast standalone text editor written in C using Gtk+2 and optionally GtkSourceView2 to provide syntax highlighting and word-completion (and other niceties). The editor is implemented with GtkTextView and does not rely on any third-party editor component such as Scintilla. The included Makefile handles the build (details below) and packages are available for OpenSuSE 13.1 through Leap 15.0 and the current release and development branch builds are available for Archlinux gtkwrite and gtkwrite-git. The editor can be compiled with or without GtkSourceView. Without GtkSourceView it will compile as gtkedit. With GtkSourceView it compiles as gtkwrite (requires GtkSourceView 2.x). Both gtkedit and gtkwrite compile and run under RaspberryPi/ARM and windows as well. (the Win-key accelerators are disabled on windows). gtkwrite is Licensed under GPLv2.
Features include Open Recent Files listing, Reload Saved File, Print (with print to .pdf provided by native print dialog), Undo/Redo, Select All, robust Find/Replace, Goto Line, Font Selection, Increase/Decreate Indent, Fixed width Indent/Unindent, current line auto-indent, smart home/end, smart backspace, Current Line Highlight, Show/Hide Right Margin at any column, Syntax Highlight, Line Numbering, Comment/Uncomment, Change Case (upper, lower, title), Join Lines, File Statistics (characters, words, whitespace, non-whitespace and line count), on-save trailing whitespace removal and POSIX end-of-line insertion. Basic word-completion is provided by GtkSourceView. Custom keypress handlers for Ctrl+Shift selection to avoid default textview handling annoyances. End-of-line detection and conversion between LF, CRLF and CR with persistent setting to use file EOL or Operating System default EOL with prompt for conversion on file open. External File Insertion within an open buffer, Insert of Date/Time both as a menu-iterm & tool-button. GIO File Monitoring for modification by foreign process. Interface provdes menu, configurable toolbar that can be shown/hidden and statusbar. Syntax language and style selection when compiled with GtkSourceView2. Correctly detects all Byte Order Marks, but currently handles only ASCII/UTF-8 character sets.
The editor has the following menu layout and shortcut key layout (if you are comfortable with the layout of KDE3 kwrite/kate, you will be right at home with this Gtk variant):
File
- New Ctrl+N
- Open Ctrl+O
+ Open Recent File
- recent_file_1
- recent_file_2
- ...
- Save Ctrl+S
- Save As Shift+Ctrl+A
- Reload Saved File F5
- Page Setup Shift+Alt+P
- Print Preview Shift+Ctrl+P *
- Print Ctrl+P
- Close Ctrl+W
- Quit Ctrl+Q
Edit
- Undo Ctrl+Z
- Redo Shift+Ctrl+Z
- Cut Ctrl+X
- Copy Ctrl+C
- Paste Ctrl+V
- Delete
- Select All Ctrl+A
- Deselect All Shift+Ctrl+A
- Find Ctrl+F
- Find & Replace Ctrl+R
- Goto Line Ctrl+G
- Preferences Alt+P
View
- Font Selection Alt+T
- Show/Hide Toolbar Ctrl+T
+ Toolbar Appearance
- Text Only
- Icons Only
- Text & Icons
- Show/Hide Right Margin Ctrl+M *
- Current Line Highlight Shift+Ctrl+H *
- Syntax Highlight Shift+Alt+H *
+ Syntax Language *
- None
+ Markup
+ ...
+ Sources
- Ada
- C
- ...
+ Syntax Color Scheme
- classic
- cobalt
- ...
- Line Numbers F11 *
- Word Wrap (on/off) F12
Tools
+ End of Line Selection
- Linux / Unix / OSX
- DOS / Windows
- Machintosh (Pre-OSX)
- Increase Indent Ctrl+I
- Decrease Indent Shift+Ctrl+I
- Indent Fixed Width Super+I
- Unindent Fixed Width Shift+Super+I
- Insert File at Cursor...
- Insert Date/Time at Cursor Shift+Ctrl+T
- Comment Ctrl+D
- Uncomment Shift+Ctrl+D
- Uppercase Ctrl+U
- Lowercase Ctrl+L
- Titlecase Shift+Alt+U
- Join Lines Ctrl+J
- Word/Char Statistics Alt+R
Help
- About
* (option in work, or only available with GtkSourceView)
The editor has a full menubar and toolbar that can be shown/hidden and set to display icons, text or both as desired. The editor provides robust find/replace dialog functionality with forward/reverse whole-document, from cursor and selection-limited search ability with configurable case sensitive/insensitive searches and the ability to limit selection/replacement to whole words. Search and replace terms are remembered between searches. (planned REGEX search/replace remains to be implemented)
The editor at present operates in a single-document-interface manner where requesting a 'New' document from the File menu will open another copy of the editor in its very own and separate window. Development is working toward a multi-document-interface where multiple files/buffers can be open within a single application window with the current document determined by selecting a document list on the left side of the edit window.
Configurable indent/unindent with align to softtab and separate indent/unindent by an absolute number of characters are provided. Default settings provide auto-indent for code layout and smart_backspace (unindent in leading whitespace). Selected sections of code can be commented/uncommented based on the string set in Preferences->Editing->Single-line comment or with autorecognition of file-type using multi-line block comemnt syntax for the appropriate language. A configurable right-margin visible guide can be shown/hidden at any column based on the value set in Settings->Appearence->Visual aids. (defautl 80 column, min 1, max 120 column) It has no effect on word-wrap, it is just a convenient visual reference for the column.
The editor provides case-conversion, lower-to-upper, upper-to-lower, and title-case. Join lines will join any number of selected lines replacing all intervening whitespace with a single space. Current window size can be saved (if clicked), otherwise the window size on exit is saved for next use if restore window size at start is selected.
Word-completion is provided by GtkSourceView. [Return] is used to activate the selected proposal. Word-completion can be enabled/disabed in Settings->File Load/Save->Word-completion. The settings dialog allows setting the minimum number of characters typed before the word-completion dialog appears. (default: 3)
A custom keypress input handler for Ctrl+Shift+Right-Arrow and Ctrl+Shift+Left-Arrow to correct the annoying default gtk handler that will select-to-end-of-next-word when used in leading whitespace instead of the desired behavior of select-to-beginning-of-next-word. A cusom keypress hanlder for Shift+Left-Arrow is also included as part of the fix to allow reduction of the selection original selection on a per-character basis by releasing the Ctrl key and using Shift+Left-Arrow. (no corresponding Shift+Right-Arrow is required as the default behavior handles reduction of the slection started with Ctrl+Shift+Right-Arrow just fine. A configuration option in Settings, Appearance->Cursor & Selection->Ctrl + Shift + Right-Arrow fix. This enables a corresponding keypress handler for Ctrl+Shift+Left-Arrow and small stack to track sequential Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right events. This is set on by default. To restore default gtk handling, simply uncheck the box in settings.
End-of-line detection (LF, CRLF and CR) is provided on file-open and can be selected in the Tools menu. Default EOL for new files on each operating system except DOS/Windows is LF (line-feed), with the DOS/Windows default being CRLF. Pre-OSX CR will be detected and set on File-Open, but no specific pre-processor check tests for earlier MacOS. After open, or change of any new file, selecting a different EOL (from the Tools menu or within Settings) will convert the file to the selected EOL. Settings->File Load/Save->End-of-Line Handling/Selection allows for a persistent EOL to be selected along with options for Use EOL from File or Use OS Default (default). When set to anything other than Use EOL from File, a prompt on file-open is presented to convert to the persistent EOL setting if the file EOL differs from the persistent setting. Once open, the Tools->End of Line Selection operates independent of the persistent setting allowing conversion to/from any of the line endings without affecting the persistent setting.
Byte Order Mark (BOM) detection of all (UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), UTF-7, UTF-1, UTF-EBCDIC, SCSU, BOCU-1, and GB-18030), but currently ASCII/UTF-8 is the only encoding handled by the editor. Work is progressing on character set handling for UTF-16/32 as well as on conversion routines between the different encodings.
When compiled with GtkSourceView, syntax highlighting, syntax language selection and selectable syntax style (color schemes) are enabled in the View menu. The provided custom styles, 'styles/gtkwrite.xml' and 'styles/gtkwrite_light.xml' provide an alternative to the default styles and works well for C or bash. Both styles are continually being refined. You may install the syles folder in the normal global search location of '/usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/' or on a per-user basis in '~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/'. (for win32, install in the gtk-runtime directory structure) Single line and block-comemnts are automatically set and functional based on the sourceview language. At present all single-line comments (which can be applied to a selected block of text as well) and multi-line comment blocks are automatically handled for ada asp awk c c-sharp cmake cpp desktop diff dosbatch erlang fortran gtkrc haskell html java js lua makefile objc octave pascal perl php python rpmspec ruby sql sh vbnet xml. Multi-line block comment start and end strings are also set based on language detected and used by default when text is selected on the screen. (this behavior is configurable in Settings (edit)). You can check Settings page to verify whether comment syntax was automatically determined for your language. If not, you can set the single-line comment to be applied as needed by your project.
(Note: for builds without GtkSourceView2, the single line comment can be set in Settings and it will be applied with the comment/uncomment commands. The automatic table lookup provided by GtkSourceView2 simply overrides this setting for the current file based on the language)
An active window title displays file/save status along with the current filename. A status bar tracks the line x/total col: y | INS/OVR | EOL | CharSet | Language state as well as displaying various operational messages. Print capabilities used the native print dialog making print/print to .pdf, etc. available. Page Setup provides access to the native printer page setup dialog. Current document content statistics are available though the Tools menu via the 'Word/Char Statistics' menuitem to display the number of whitespace, non-whitespace and other character counts, along with the word and line counts for the current contents of the editor. (this is more useful for general text documents rather than for coding).
GIO File Monitoring added to monitor for source modification by a foreign process. File modify, move and delete are currently monitored. Attribute changes are ignored. If a file modification occurs not commanded by the user (e.g. by issuing a file-save or save-as), the user is prompted to either save the current document overwriting any changes or to reload and incorporate the foreign modifications to allow source additions/modifications from the command-line.
The code is in relatively good shape and reasonably commented. The code is separated into files by functionality, but a more modular rewrite is planned. There are parts that are newer than others leaving some areas of the code that may still be tidied up and separated further. The options handling throughout the code is done via a central struct that is passed by parameter as required. The goal being to store routinely used information to cut down on the number of function calls. All in all, the code builds into a single executable of roughly 130K (stripped), 170K otherwise, and builds Intel/AMD, raspberryPi/ARM and Windows (tested on Archlinux, openSuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows 7 & 10).
I recommend using a build directory to maintain a clean source tree. (although the object files and executables are generated under separate subdirectores, e.g. obj/ and bin/ should you choose to build in the source directory) To perform an out-of-source build, simply create a 'gtkwrite.build' directory at the same level as your repository and then soft-link the sources and Makefile in the build directory, e.g.:
$ mkdir gtkwrite.build && cd gtkwrite.build
$ for i in ../gtkwrite/*.[ch] ../gtkwrite/Makefile; do ln -s "$i"; done
$ make
The default build is without GtkSourceView. If you have GtkSourceView 2.x installed, simply pass the with=-DWGTKSOURCEVIEW2 as an argument to make. For example, to build without GtkSourceView, simply type:
$ make
To enable GtkSourceView and syntax highlighting (with GtkSourceView 2.x installed), build with:
$ make clean
$ make with=-DWGTKSOURCEVIEW2
Note: you must use make clean before calling make when switching back and forth between versions and after each git pull.
To build either on win32 and enable the -subsystem,windows link option, add
$ make ss=-DWIN
Both GtkEdit and GtkWrite will compile with either MinGW or TDM-MinGW compilers. If you choose TDM-MinGW (separately or as part of CodeBlocks for windows), you will need to adjust the Makefile as the windows version of mkdir is used. After installing MinGW, the packages required to compile on windows are:
- https://download.gnome.org/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.24/gtk+-bundle_2.24.10-20120208_win32.zip
- https://download.gnome.org/binaries/win32/gtksourceview/2.10/gtksourceview-2.10.0.zip
- https://download.gnome.org/binaries/win32/gtksourceview/2.10/gtksourceview-dev-2.10.0.zip
- http://xmlsoft.org/sources/win32/libxml2-2.7.8.win32.zip
- https://download.gnome.org/binaries/win32/dependencies/libxml2_2.9.0-1_win32.zip *hicolor-icon-theme-0.17.tar.gz
(Msys has libxml2 available, but it requires adding it to your path if you use it. The hicolor-icon-theme is not required, but is helpful to eliminate a runtime warning on windows if you have no default Gtk+2 icon theme set when using the File-open/save dialogs -- simply place the resulting 'hicolor' directory below 'share/iconin the same location you installed the required gtk2 libraries/headers, e.g.c:\gtk2\share\icons\hicolor. I generally put all Linux additions to windows under c:\opt, e.g. c:\opt\gtk2...`)
Just unzip gtk+-bundle_2.24.10-20120208_win32.zip to a directory of your choice. (e.g. c:\opt\gtk2), then unzip and add the files from the other packages to the appropriate directores (e.g. bin, include, lib, etc..). Don't forget to add the path to the MinGW and gtk2 bin directores to your windows PATH variable. (e.g. rt-click My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Settings -> Environment Variables and add the paths to your personal environment (e.g. the TOP section) and then start Msys, Command Prompt (cmd.exe) or powershell to compile.
Regardless which OS you are compiling on, the package should compile without any warnings. If you receive a warning, something is wrong, fix it before proceeding. It is currently compiled on Archlinux, openSuSE, debian/raspberryPi, Ubuntu, Win_7 and Win_10. (note: on windows, after mingw update to gcc 6.3, a deprecated warning is displayed from the gobject library (due to its use of 1 << 31 not being an integer value) -- it's not our warning, remove -pedantic to suppress)
On Linux, the default location for the configuration file is $HOME/.config/gtkwrite. On windows it is %LOCALAPPDATA%\gtkwrite.
On Linux system wide syntax color-schemes (styles) are found in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles and personal styles can be added in $HOME/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles. On win32, the system wide style directory will depend on where you installed the gtksourceview2 files, any personal styles can be placed in %LOCALAPPDATA%\gtksourceview-2.0\styles.
On Linux, a gtkrc-2.0_gtkwrite file to reduce the button-spacing for GtkInfoBar is installed to /usr/share/gtkwrite.
On Windows, where you install the gtkwrite.exe executable is irrelevant to the operation of the editor. However, until an installer is created, to have the GPL license and logo displayed in help-about you should install to C:/Program Files/GtkWrite (on 32-bit versions) or to C:/Program Files (x86)/GtkWrite for 64-bit versions. (include the gtkrc-2.0_gtkwrite, gpl-2.0.txt files and the img directory in that the same location)
Give it a try, help make it better. Drop me a line if you have any questions.