ce: a c language terminal editor

• Emacs and Vim are awesome, but they have some problems we'd like to address without having to learn/write vimscript or emacs lisp. However, we want to take some awesome ideas from each:
  • Emacs's idea where everything is a just a plain text buffer. We get a familiar and common interface for all buffer types and can copy+paste from anywhere (even the terminal)
  • Vim's modal editting. We really like it! It also makes the transition to using ce easier. (Note: the default configuration implements vim-like editting)
• The config is written in the C programming language and compiled into a shared object that you can reload while running. No need to learn a new language!
• Registers in vim are awesome, but it's not easy to see what you have in registers or even know what registers are occupied. In ce, you have info buffers '[marks]', '[macros]', '[yanks]' to show what you have in each register.
• Search in vim/emacs with regular expressions is awesome, but each have a special implementation of regexes with special syntax in certain cases. We just want to use the c standard library's regex implementation, so we don't have to remember special rules. We also support plain search.
• Macros in vim are awesome, but:
  • If you mess up while creating a macro, you have to start over. In ce, when you are viewing your recorded macros, you can select any macro to edit it
• Syntax Highlighting in emacs and vim are done and extended using regexes, which are not great to read. In ce, a c interface is provided for custom syntax highlighting. See ce_syntax.h for examples.
• When using the terminal, there is often output with file and line numbers (compiler errors, greps, etc) that we would like to easily scroll through. Ctrl+n and Ctrl+p scans the last terminal for lines with common file:line patterns and jumps you to the file relative to the terminal directory.
• The authors need to work remotely, so the editor needs to be able to run in a terminal.
• It is fun learning how to make a text editor.
• Using something on a daily basis that we created gives us the warm and fuzzies.

• Requirements
  • c11 compiler
  • ncurses library

$ make term

• Requirements
  • c11 compiler
  • SDL2

$ make gui

• Requirements
  • c11 compiler
  • SDL2
  • SDL2_ttf
  • Visual Studio

Download SDL2 and split it up:

• Move the headers into external\include\
• Move the libraries into external\lib\
• Move the dlls into build/windows/

Then find Visual Studio's vcvarsall.bat, likely in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio... and update setup.bat to point to that.

$ setup.bat $ build.bat

$ ce path/to/file.c

Build a shared object that implements these functions:

bool ce_init(CeApp_t* app){
     // initialize your config here
     return true;
}

bool ce_free(CeApp_t* app){
     // clean up your config here
     return true;
}

When running ce, pass it the path to the shared object
$ ce -c path/to/config.so

See https://www.github.com/justy989/ce_config for an example configuration