Terminal Text Editor (C + ncurses)

A lightweight, Vim-inspired terminal text editor written in C using the ncurses library. Built from scratch to explore low-level systems programming, terminal rendering, and text manipulation.

Features

Core Functionality

• Insert mode (i)
• Save file (:w)
• Quit (:q)
• Arrow-key scrolling
• Status banner showing filename, row, and column
• Forward search (/pattern)
• Navigate search results (n, p)

Additional Features

• Line numbers (:set number)
• Jump to end of file (G)
• Spell-check highlighting using a dictionary file

Requirements

• GCC or Clang
• ncurses

Run on terminal: ./myeditor example.txt

Design Notes

1. Text is stored as a dynamically allocated array of strings
2. Scrolling handled via row/column offsets
3. Spell-checking implemented with binary search over a sorted dictionary
4. Rendering optimized using ncurses color pairs

Future Improvements

1. Horizontal scrolling refinement
2. Undo/redo
3. Better word tokenization
4. File open/create from editor

Built With:

• C
• ncurses