Vex

A tabbed text editor with a file navigator, that remembers where you were.

Open a folder and it becomes the navigator beside your tabs. Close the window and open it again, and it comes back where you left it: the same folder, the same files, and the one you were looking at still in front. Unsaved work is never remembered silently. Closing asks about it first.

Choosing a folder

• Ctrl+O opens a file and Ctrl+Shift+O a folder, through the system’s own file dialogs.
• Click the folder’s name at the top of the navigator to switch it to Open: folders only, your recent ones first, then the folder you are in among its neighbours, with a path above to climb as far as the top of the drive. A click on a folder makes it the one you work in. The arrow keys only move, so looking around changes nothing.
• While you look, the editor steps aside for a picture of the folder under the pointer: its languages, its Maven modules, whether it is a git repository, and for Java its classes, records and most-used annotations.
• A window with nothing open starts in Open.

Editing the way editors do

• Sixteen formats highlighted: Java, Python, JavaScript, JSON and JSONC, Markdown, HTML, CSS, XML, YAML, INI and .properties, shell, PowerShell, batch, diff and Dockerfile.
• Double-click a word, triple-click a line, and keep the button down to extend by whole words or lines.
• Home goes to where the indentation ends, then to the margin. Enter keeps the indentation, and Tab over several lines indents all of them.
• Find with Ctrl+F, word wrap with Alt+Z, zoom with Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-.
• Go to declaration in Java with Ctrl+Enter, and again for the next one.
• Whitespace that matters shows as a faint dot: indentation, trailing blanks, and runs of two or more. The single space between words is left alone.

Careful with your files

• It keeps line endings. A CRLF file saves as CRLF, and a file whose line endings are not your system’s ends each line with a faint ¬, so you can see how it will be saved.
• A save cannot half-happen. It writes beside the file and then moves over it, so a failed save leaves the old file whole.
• It refuses what it would corrupt. Binary files, files with control characters, lines over 100,000 characters and files over 8 MB are refused with the reason, rather than opened and damaged on save.
• It never quits over unsaved work. Closing anything unsaved asks: Save, Don’t save, or Cancel. A save that fails cancels the close.

With the rest of the suite

Every tab and every row in the navigator has Open in Vexplore, which shows the file in Vexplore with the file selected. Installing adds text-editor to your PATH, so text-editor <folder or files> opens a new window from any terminal, MainFrame included. It also registers for text and source file types: it is always listed under Open with, and becomes the default only for types no other program has claimed.

Status

It is part of the 0.1.0 prerelease.

Install the suite · Source