🧠 Smartt Editor

A lightweight terminal-based text editor built in Rust using Crossterm.

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📌 Overview

Smartt Editor is a minimal, fast, and extensible text editor that runs directly in your terminal.

It is built from scratch in Rust with a focus on:

• ⚡ Performance
• 🧩 Simplicity
• 🛠️ Low-level terminal control
• 🧠 Learning systems programming concepts

This project is inspired by building editors like kilo, but implemented using modern Rust tooling.

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✨ Features

• 📄 Open and render files
• ⌨️ Real-time keyboard input handling
• 🧭 Cursor navigation (arrow keys, Home, End, Page Up/Down)
• 🖥️ Full terminal rendering with buffering
• 🧹 Clean terminal state management (raw mode handling)
• 🎯 Minimal and fast

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🎥 Demo Behavior

When you run the editor:

• Displays a welcome screen: Jolah-Smartt Editor --- Version 0.1.0

• ~ fills empty lines like classic editors

• Opens a file if passed as an argument

• Supports navigation using arrow keys

Exit with:

Ctrl + Q

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🏗️ Architecture

The editor is structured into modular components:

🧾 EditorRows

• Handles file reading
• Stores and manages text buffer

🎯 CursorController

• Manages cursor position
• Handles movement logic and bounds

🖥️ EditorContents

• Output buffer for efficient rendering
• Implements Write trait for batching terminal updates

📺 Output

• Responsible for:
  • Drawing rows
  • Refreshing screen
  • Cursor rendering

⌨️ Reader

• Handles keyboard input using event polling

🧠 Editor

• Core orchestrator
• Runs event loop
• Processes keypresses

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⚡ Getting Started

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Jolah1/smartt.git
cd smartt
2. Build the project
cargo build
3. Run the editor
cargo run
4. Open a file
cargo run <filename>

Example:

cargo run notes.txt 🎮 Controls Key Action ↑ ↓ ← → Move cursor Home Move to start of line End Move to end of line Page Up / Down Scroll Ctrl + Q Quit editor 🧠 How It Works The terminal is switched to raw mode Input is captured without line buffering Screen is: Cleared Redrawn on every frame Output is buffered before flushing (efficient rendering) Cursor is repositioned after each frame 🔐 Terminal Safety

The editor ensures proper cleanup using a Drop implementation:

impl Drop for CleanUp { fn drop(&mut self) { terminal::disable_raw_mode().expect("Unable to disable raw mode") } }

This guarantees your terminal won’t break if the program exits unexpectedly.

🚧 Roadmap Text editing (insert/delete) File saving Syntax highlighting Status bar Search functionality Line numbers Undo/Redo 🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Fork the repo Create a feature branch Make your changes Submit a PR 🚀

Rust Developer Bitcoin & Lightning Builder Open Source Contributor 📚 Inspiration The original kilo text editor Low-level terminal programming concepts Rust systems programming ecosystem ⭐ Support

If you find this project useful:

⭐ Star the repo 🍴 Fork it 🧠 Learn from it

📜 License

MIT License