libeditor

libeditor is an architecture for building document editors. It strives to automatically provide functionality that a user might expect of such programs, such as undo/redo, interface customization, hotkey support and persistent configuration.

Features

• QWebView for displaying document contents (HTML)
• Multi-document support with tabs
• Easy to create toolbars and menus
• Actions with built-in support for shorcuts, undo/redo and greying out

Architecture

The architecture is based on four concepts:

• Document is the class that contains the data to be edited. It is a QWidget object (by default QWebView), and it has a title, an undo_stack and a refresh() method.

• Action encapsulates a possible user action, such as opening a new document or inserting something in the current one. It has a label and shortcut, allowing it to be placed in menus or toolbars, where its availability (greyed out or not) is defined by the parameter is_available(doc). Its main function(doc) may execute the action directly or return a Command to do so.

• Command is an action executed upon a specific document. The user must extend the class and override its redo() and undo() methods.

• MainWindow contains zero or more Documents displayed in tabs, toolbars and menus containing Actions and supports opening new documents, redoing and undoing commands out of the box.

Detailed behavior

• Tabs

  • Tabs can be reordered by dragging
  • The currently focused tab has a close button (like Firefox)
  • Ctrl+W closes the current tab
  • Middle click closes the clicked tab
  • Tab bar is hidden when there's only one document
  • Automatically focus on newly opened tabs

• Main Window

  • Empty documents can be created with Ctrl+N
  • Unnamed documents are labeled "Untitled Document x"
  • Easy to add new toolbars and menus with their actions
  • Title displays the current document name
  • "App" object is created automatically
  • Window size, position and toolbars are saved and loaded automatically
  • Method to quickly add a standard 'File' menu

• Actions

  • Can contain a label
  • Support for redo and undo functions
  • Receives an availability function and refreshes automatically
  • Can have shortcuts
  • Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z automatically undo and redo the last actions
  • Undo stack is kept in a per-document basis
  • Actions without undo are considered global
  • 'None' actions are rendered as separators in toolbars and menus

• Document

  • Has a title, filepath and filetype
  • Contains its own undo stack
  • Keeps track of which executed commands were saved (clean) or not
  • Asks for confirmation when closing with unsaved changes
  • Save and save-as work as expected

Future features

• Support dynamic toolbars (variable number of actions)
• Enable default menus (File, Edit)
• Macro support? Technically the undo_stack already has it
• Status bar?
• Auto updater?
• Reset geomtry/state?
• Fix title bug when file is saved with different name