sled - Simple text editor
=========================

For installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.


Q&A
---

Q: Why?
A: - Because newcomers don't find vi(m) comfortable. Something akin to EDIT.COM
     is usually perceived as more familiar: type text straight away, C-S to
     save, then C-Q. (Sled still has vim-like behavior, but it is "reverse" -
     default is insert mode, from which you can enter command mode.)
   - Because nano/joe are still relatively complicated.
   - As an exercise in programming in C, and to create an editor to my own
     liking, closer to suckless principles.

Q: Why can't sled open the file "read only" even if modification is disallowed?
A: A text editor's purpose should be to *edit* text files. For just *viewing*
   text files, there's less(1). This avoids the situation when opening a file
   one is not allowed to write to with an editor like vi(1), only to have write
   operation denied after making numerous edits.

   Of course, one could argue that screen editors like vi already double as
   text file viewers, but I think of displaying the contents of a writable file
   as being separate from displaying the contents of a non-writable file.

   If this bothers you, you can use something like the included shell script
   sledv.

Q: Is editing multiple files planned?
A: No, and this is by design. You can edit multiple files at the same time by
   running multiple instances of sled. You can arrange them on screen through a
   terminal multiplexer like GNU screen(1) or tmux(1), or just open several
   terminal emulators like st(1) and have your window manager arrange their
   windows. Inter-process "clipboard" can be managed by a terminal multiplexer
   or X.Org itself.

Q: Is there a ~/.config/sled/config or ~/.sledrc?
A: No, and never will be. sled is intended to be configured through editing
   config.h and recompilation, like suckless software.

Q: Are plugins planned?
A: No. Like suckless software, sled is meant to be extended through patches.

Q: Why doesn't sled have feature X from text editor Y?
A: Most likely because it is not essential to editing text files. However, you
   are free to offer a patch supporting the feature, which will be included in
   the repository, with credits to the author.

Q: How can I configure sled if I installed it (from AUR|through my distro's
   package manager)?
A: You don't. If you want customization/configuration, clone the git repo,
   customize and compile it from source, just like with suckless software.

Q: Why am I getting a "Permission denied" when trying to edit a file?
A: You either can't access the directory for writing and search (execute bit)
   and haven't disabled the creation of backups nor set backup_fail to 0, or
   can't access the file itself for writing.

Q: How to get crontab -e to work?
A: Set the backup_fail to 0 in config.h. If that fails, set create_backups to 0
   in that file.

Q: Why are some wide characters covering the dialogs (help, search, replace)?
A: This is due to how wide characters work. The character is probably one cell
   to the left of the border, and it needs two cells to be displayed. Writing
   the border character one cell to the right is not enough, the previous
   character would need to be overwritten by a single-cell character like Space.  
   Currently, termbox doesn't support getting the character from its display
   buffer, which would enable testing for this case and handling it (but see
   [1]).


[1]: https://github.com/termbox/termbox2/pull/65


License
-------

sled - Simple text editor
Copyright (C) 2022-2024  Страхиња Радић

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.

File termbox.h is based on termbox2 TUI library, (c) 2021 termbox developers,
which is released under the terms of Expat license, see the file
LICENSE.termbox.