notepad.tui 0.3.3

Notepad.Tui — Alpha Release (v0.3.2)

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 fourth public preview of the project. This release includes a comprehensive set of features that establish the core editing and navigation capabilities, including loading and editing large files using a memory mapped file.

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
• Duplicate line or selection.
• Move line up and down.
• Indent and outdent selection or line.
• Trim trailing whitespace from the current line.

✔️ Large File Support with Memory-Mapped Files

• Loads files of 10MB or larger using memory-mapped files for efficient access.
• Fixed performance problems with multi-pass calculations that caused slow loading of large files.
• Fixed performance issues in typing and navigation in large files by removing O(N) operations.

What’s Not Included Yet (By Design)

The following features are planned for future updates:

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