ZUI’s architecture has proven its value. I have only superficially tried to write a text editor in it, and it was elevated in about 30 minutes. Multiple text-fields, one for each line of text from input file – and that’s pretty it. Saving file is a breeze with inline-handlers:
-zui_std_rc_button "bsave" "Save" 'internal=1; print -rl -- "${lines[@]}" > $edited_file'
The code in apostrophes will be invoked on press of the button. Creating text fields for each line of text from input file is also easy:
noglob -zui_std_text_field "tfield${idx}" width offset lines[$idx]
The noglob causes line[$idx] to be treated as text and not as pattern. So, a hyper-link is created, with
backend-variable line[<line-number>] – which is single entry in array to which we read the whole file.
The text editor supports 1000 lines on current Zshells. I have submitted optimizations that make this 6000 lines – they will be rolled out in next Zsh release (5.3.2). Main use case of such text-area is IMO editing of small config file in a deploy tool, where you change only e.g. an IP, and press “Deploy” to run main task. That’s why 1000 lines is enough, and 6000 even better.
Check out recorded demo of this text editor.