The micro Text Editor

This is our version of the kilo editor, a simple but functional text editor that can be implemented in about 1,000 lines of C code; if you're interested, you can see a step-by-step guide to writing this editor here: https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

micro largely follows the same structure as the kilo code, except we divided it into multiple modules and documented the code following the CS 220 style guide.

Building and Running

You can build the micro editor by running the following:

cmake -B build/
make -C build/

This will generate a micro executable inside a build/ directory. You can run the editor like this:

build/micro

This will open the editor with a blank file.

Or like this:

build/micro foobar.txt

This will open file foobar.txt (Note: the file must exist already)

Once you've opened micro, you can use the arrows keys to move around, and you can type to edit the file. You can quit the editor by pressing Ctrl-Q (if you modified the file, you'll have to press it three times to confirm you want to exit without saving).

Careful: the version of micro in this repository is intentionally buggy. For example, trying to save the file (by pressing Ctrl-S) will cause the editor to crash.

Code Organization

The micro code is divided into the following files:

• main.c: Contains the main() function for the editor, which involves a simple event loop that calls functions in other modules.
• editor.c/editor.h: Provides high-level editor operations, like loading, saving, inserting a character at the cursor's position, etc.
• row.c/row.h: Lower-level operations on individual "rows" of the editor (a "row" corresponds to a line in the file we are editing)
• input.c/input.h: Functions for getting input from the user.
• screen.c/screen.h: High-level functions for drawing and manipulating the editor's screen.
• terminal.c/terminal.h: Lower-level terminal operations.
• common.h: Common definitions shared by multiple files.