notepad.tui 0.2.5

Notepad.Tui — Alpha Release (v0.2.5)

A fast, clean, and modern terminal-based text viewer for .NET, inspired by classic tools like Notepad and contemporary editor engines.
This alpha focuses on delivering a rock‑solid view and editing experience with smooth navigation, precise selection, and a responsive UI built on top of Terminal.Gui.

This is the third public preview of the project. It’s intentionally limited in scope, but the foundation is strong and ready for community feedback. This release includes editing capabilities, undo/redo, cut/copy/paste support, find/replace dialogs, and additional features to round out the experience (status bar, MRU file list, changing file encoding.

This update has the full set of editor features, please try out the tool and share any feedback or issues you encounter!

Cumulative Features

✔️ Smooth, predictable navigation

• Arrow keys, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End
• Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End
• Horizontal navigation with automatic viewport scrolling
• Vertical navigation with correct caret visibility

✔️ Mouse support

• Click to move caret
• Click‑and‑drag selection
• Horizontal drag‑scrolling
• Vertical drag‑scrolling (auto‑scroll when dragging above/below viewport)
• Scroll wheel support

✔️ Selection behavior that feels like a real editor

• Multi‑line selection
• Zero‑length (caret‑only) selection
• Correct clipping when selection is partially visible
• No “sticky” selection artifacts when scrolling
• Accurate mapping between document and viewport coordinates

✔️ Rendering engine

• Efficient line rendering
• Horizontal clipping
• Selection segment rendering
• Dark theme included
• Clean separation between document model, view model, and renderer

✔️ Resize‑aware UI

• Terminal and viewport resizing handled gracefully
• Caret and selection remain consistent after resize
• No redraw artifacts or flicker

✔️ Word wrap

• Menu toggle to turn word wrap on/off
• Wrap long text lines within the view width

✔️ Text editing capabilities

• Write text, insert, delete, and replace text
• Undo/redo support for text changes
• Save and Save As functionality to write changes back to disk

✔️ Find and Replace

• Ability to search for text within the document (find next/previous)
• Replace functionality to substitute text with new content
• Support for case-sensitive and whole-word search options
• User-friendly dialogs for find and replace operations
• Highlighting of search results within the document
• Go to line functionality to quickly navigate to specific lines in the document

Features Added this Release

✔️ Enhanced Keyboard Navigation

• Move to next/previous word with Ctrl+Arrow keys
• Select next/previous word with Ctrl+Shift+Arrow keys
• Delete next/previous word with Ctrl+Backspace and Ctrl+Delete
• Triple-click to select entire line (works with word wrap)

✔️ Status Bar

• Implemented StatusBar view to show line/column, encoding, and line ending information
• Updates dynamically as the caret moves and document changes
• View > Status bar menu option to toggle visibility of the status bar

✔️ Change File Encoding

• Added support for changing the file encoding through a menu options
• Encoding submenu with options for UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE, and UTF-8 with BOM
• Undo/redo operation to change encoding and update the document model accordingly
• Ensure document IsDirty flag is set when encoding changes

✔️ Additional Editing Features

• Line number gutter in the editor view (optional toggle via View menu)
• Recent files submenu to quickly access recently opened documents (last 10)
• Zoom behavior with status bar hint to use terminal zoom, and message box if status bar is hidden
• Insert/Overwrite mode toggle
• Help/About dialog with version info & link to documentation

What’s Not Included Yet (By Design)

The following features are planned for future phases:

• Large file support using memory-mapped files
• Status bar enhancements like word count and selection length

The goal of this release is to validate the interaction model, viewport engine, and editing capabilities.

Architecture Overview

Notepad.Tui is built on a layered design:

• Document Model
  Encoding‑aware, line‑ending‑aware, deterministic text model.

• View Model
  Tracks viewport offsets, caret position, selection, and visible lines.

• Renderer
  Draws only what’s visible, with correct clipping and selection segments.

• Terminal.Gui Client
  Handles input, mouse events, resizing, and dispatches to the view model.

This architecture is designed for long‑term maintainability and future features like editing, incremental rendering, and memory-mapped huge files.

Installing & Running

The Notepad.Tui tool is available as a global .NET tool installable from NuGet.org. You can install it using the following command:

dotnet tool install --global notepad.tui --version 0.2.5