Crate kaolinite[][src]

Expand description

Welcome to the documentatoin for Kaolinite

What is Kaolinite?

At first, it seems like buliding a text editor is easy, some pepole have made ones in fewer than 1000 lines! But when you try opening files with unicode or large files or implement your own configuration system that allows the user to create custom themes and add their own syntax highlighting it becomes very disorientating very quickly, and when using crates like syntect you start seeing the crates your editor depends on stack up and it compiles slower and slower.

Kaolinite is a library that has most of the features you’ll need in order to create a TUI text editor, like vim or nano. It’s lightweight and tries to implement text editing in the most efficient way possible.

It doesn’t force you to use any TUI library in the Rust ecosystem, so you can choose how to implement your UI. Nor does it force you to use any style of editor, your editor could be modal if you wanted it to be.

Usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
kaolinite = "0"

Or you can use cargo-edit:

$ cargo add kaolinite

The main struct that you’ll want to use is Document. This struct handles the insertion and deletion of characters, splitting rows, splicing rows, reading files, saving files, cursor position and scrolling, searcing, syntax highlighting, undo and redo, and unicode grapheme handling.

There is also a Row struct that provides more row-specific operations and information such as finding word boundaries, rendering themselves in certain ways, and determining if the row has been modified. You won’t really need to use many of the methods here, as Document handles most of the row operations you’d need.

Here are a few examples of how it would look:

// Opening a file,
use kaolinite::document::Document;
let mut doc = Document::new();
// Imagine if test.txt were `The quick brown fox`
doc.open("test.txt").expect("Failed to open file");
// This would get the word boundaries of the first row: [0, 4, 10, 16, 19]
println!("{:?}", doc.row(0).words());

Because this library is quite a large collection of tools, it’s hard to demonstrate it here. You can find a examples directory on github with many different examples, including a barebones text editor using the crossterm library, in under 300LOC, with full support for unicode. You can use that as a starting point, if you wish.

Modules

document: Tools for opening and saving files

event: Enums that represent the status of the editor and events

row: Tools for inserting and removing characters

Macros

Lazy regex creation

String helper macro