wordNebula

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Software Tools
• Dependencies
  • Libraries
• Application Architecture
  • Overview Design
  • Model
  • View
  • Presenter
• Current State
• Next Steps

Introduction

I am a casual reader and the occasional writer of my thoughts. I honestly do not publish anything. This project came about after reading and seeing videos of George R. R. Martin using a word processor that requires DOS to run. After doing some research, I saw these terminal-based word processors still exist. From what I could find out, they still exist due to the fact that professional writers prefer a distraction-free writing environment.

The goal of this project is implement a word processor that focuses having a distraction free environment.

Software Tools

• VSCode
• CMake
• Devcontainer (for developing in consistent environment across my different computers)

Dependencies

Libraries

• ncurses, current terminal UI library might change in the future.
• spdlog

Application Architecture

I decided to follow the architecture of Model View Presenter. From what I understood starting this project, it fit the scope of being a small to medium project and I like that it was not tightly couple with the Presenter being one doing most of the logic.

While this is a side project and getting the fundamental logic is the first step and saving to a simple text file is the goal. The architecture below shows my over all thoughts on where I would like to eventually get to with this project.

Overview Design

graph LR
    Model <---> Presenter
    View ---> TerminalUI
    UserInput <--- View
    Presenter <---> View
    Presenter <---> FileHandler
    Presenter <---> spdlog
    Presenter <---> FileFormatter
    FileFormatter <---> MarkdownFormatter
    FileFormatter <---> TextFormatter
    FileFormatter <---> ODTFormatter

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Model

The model will be responsible managing the data, by this I mean it will only take care of keeping the buffer and keeping track of all the edits

View

Reponsible for taking user input and rendering all terminal UI and content of the buffer.

Presenter

Reponsible for all creating all files, formatting the documents before saving them, creating the logger.

Current State

Currently it works as the basic you type and it shows up on the terminal nothing beyond that.

Next Steps

• Model: PieceTable or GapBuffer implementation to track all changes
• Model: Save to file actually
• Presenter: Well this is for me to define all the features I really want to include
• View: Currently basic will eventually need to scope this part to make it appealing