* 文 (wen)

[[file:wen.jpg]]

~wen~ is an experimental terminal text editor, written during the Winter 2022 batch at the [[https://www.recurse.com/][Recurse Center]]. It was an exploration of terminal raw mode, ANSI escape sequences, and UTF-8 / wide-character glyph rendering. It works only as a very simple text editor.

A motivating idea behind ~wen~ was to keep the editor itself minimal. Text manipulation would be delegated to external programs and saved shell snippets. Selected regions would be piped through standard input and output; for example:

- Convert case: ~tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'~
- Sort and deduplicate lines: ~sort -u~
- Reflow paragraphs or align columns: ~fmt -w 72~, ~column -t~
- Search and replace: ~sed 's/foo/bar/g'~

This piping mechanism was left unimplemented, along with undo/redo, line numbers, jumping to characters, Unicode combining marks, and bidirectional text support.

** Usage

#+begin_src shell
wen [file]
#+end_src

If no file is specified, ~wen~ opens a scratch buffer in ~$XDG_CACHE_HOME/wen/scratch~.

Logs are written to ~$XDG_CACHE_HOME/wen/log~.

** Controls

|-------------------+-------------------------|
| Key               | Action                  |
|-------------------+-------------------------|
| Arrow keys        | Move cursor             |
| =Home= / =End=        | Start / end of line     |
| =PageUp= / =PageDown= | Scroll up / down a page |
| =Ctrl-s=            | Save buffer             |
| =Ctrl-x=            | Save buffer as          |
| =Ctrl-q=            | Quit                    |
| =Escape=            | Cancel prompt           |
|-------------------+-------------------------|

** Installation

#+begin_src shell
go install code.chimeric.al/dwrz/wen/cmd/wen@latest
#+end_src