Why another text editor ?

tfel-editor is meant to be a text editor merging the power of Emacs concepts with the amazing abilities of the Qt library.

Why another text editor ?

The primary idea behind this project is to have a GUI editor which can leverage the full power of the tools that I have developped, for example MFront (see http://tfel.sourceforge.net and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898122115003132), MTest, Licos (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029549315003842) and bring this power to standard engineers.

Those tools are mostly based in text files, so I decided to create a text editor:

  • which is inspired by GNU Emacs main concepts (such as buffers, major modes, etc..).
  • that would make full use of the Qt library

This text editor is meant to have the following advantages:

  • Use C++ as the main language.
  • Portability (Linux is the primary target, but Windows/FreeBSD/Mac Os are also considered as first class targets).
  • The ability to use Windows-type short-cuts for users not at ease with GNU Emacs ones and have all the power of the editor accessible from the GUI.
  • The ability to integrate this editor into external software. More precisely, the projet is decomposed in a shared library caleed TFELEditor and an executable tfel-editor. The library provides the main widgets (for example the EditorWidget) that can be reused out of the box.
  • Develop some new ideas.