Sandy text editor
Sandy is an ncurses text editor with an easy-to-read, hackable C source. Sandy tries to maximize screen estate, minimize the SLOC used and not get in your way too much. It can somehow be controlled using a named pipe that lives in /tmp and all preferences and keybindings are to be chosen at compile time.
The code used to be at SourceForge, but it is now hosted as a mercurial repo at suckless.org.
Next, the mandatory screenshot of sandy 0.4 running inside rxvt-unicode in a dwm session.
Features / Non-features
- Unlimited undo
- Regex search
- Simple, almost modeless keybindings
- Selection-based operation
- Very simple commands read from a named pipe
- Very basic, regex-based syntax colouring (sorry, I'm a sucker for pretty colors)
- Xterm-like mouse support
- X11 integration is achieved through external tools such as xsel and dmenu
- Lacks many text processing facilities that can be easily achieved by piping text through an external command
One big change
Sandy used to be a GTK+/GtkSourceView2 simple text editor and I was quite happy with it. However, GTK+ programming is somehow frustrating and I longed for an editor which could be used in the linux console or in a remote ssh session easily. Re-writing the program to use ncurses proved to be interesting. Ncurses sucks, but it sucks less than GTK+. You can find the old page here.
Name
The name "sandy" is not a twisted acronym nor has anything to do with text editing. Sandy was one of our lovely pet ferrets; she was specially smart and playful, but unfortunately she died right before I started coding this. For the curious or the nostalgic there is a pic here.
Contact
Feel free to contact rafael.garcia.gallego@gmail.com for comments, patches, etc.