Menu (feature request)

[marco-trovato]

This is currently the only text editor for terminal with CUA standard keybindings that supports text selection, mouse, and ESPECIALLY text folding/collapsing (it's literally the only one with this feature).

Tilde, Micro, and NiceEditor are missing these features.

Can you please...please🙏 add a menu? Even just with File -> Open / Save / Quit
Thank you

[orbitalquark]

I agree this would be nice to have. Thanks for the reminder. While CDK (the terminal widget toolkit Textadept uses) supports menu widgets, I don't think it has a menu bar or support for nested submenus. Writing those widgets would be difficult for me, so that's why the terminal version of Textadept doesn't have menus :(

The "Tools > Select Command" (Ctrl+P) dialog helps alleviate this to an extent though.

[marco-trovato]

Honest question: is it really that difficult to

1. Without even saving the text buffer currently on the screen, just violently print withut grace on the top of the screen "FILE" with "SAVE, LOAD and QUIT" below
2. Wait for the right hotkey and call the relative function
3. Just redraw/refresh the screen to show the editor to return to the working file

?

I ask because it sounds like 10 lines of C code to my experience and it would make a huge difference in term of usability and initial learning curve.

(instead of hardcoding the menu it could be even easily possibile to use an external file which binds a new item of the menu to the relative function)

[orbitalquark]

It might not be difficult to do, but it is a hard-coded, half-baked, inflexible solution that defeats the purpose of Textadept. Using an external file adds an additional layer of complexity (and failure point) that would likely not be worth it.

Ctrl+P for now is the way to go through Textadept's menu in the terminal.

[marco-trovato]

You are 100% right I didn't know about CTRL-P.
I have only one simple legit question: why in the holy cult of the dead cow did you chose CTRL-P instead of ESC ? This menu would have been perfect if I only knew it existed

[orbitalquark]

Textadept's keybindings were designed to be as consistent and predictable as possible across all platforms, including the terminal version. Escape cancels autocompletion, calltips, snippets, find/replace, etc. Having it show the command entry would not fit in.

[oOosys]

Why isn't this issue closed yet?

[orbitalquark]

I need to find the time to experiment with https://invisible-mirror.net/cdk/manpage/cdk_menu.3.html and see if it's viable. If it's not, then I'll close this.

[orbitalquark]

After investigating further, CDK's menu widget is too limited.

• It does not support more than one level of sub-menus
  • It might be possible to construct a top-level menu in such a way that the submenu's title is used as a label, and if that menu item is selected, activate a new menu with the sub-menu. However, mapping activateCDKMenu()'s return value to a submenu to show next is not trivial, nor is mapping a sub-menu's return value to a menu ID. That last bit is probably a dealbreaker.
• It does not appear to support menu separators
• read_menu() cannot return a newCDKMenu(), but probably has to return a list of labels or some sort of malloc()ed struct; it WILL leak memory, as there is no way to free it after the fact

For reference, here is my test snippet:

void *read_menu(lua_State *L, int index) {
	const char **menu = calloc(lua_rawlen(L, index) + 1, sizeof(const char *));
	for (size_t i = 1; i <= lua_rawlen(L, index); lua_pop(L, 1), i++) {
		if (lua_rawgeti(L, index, i) != LUA_TTABLE) continue; // popped on loop
		bool is_submenu = lua_getfield(L, -1, "title");
		if (!is_submenu) lua_rawgeti(L, -2, 1), lua_replace(L, -2);
		const char *label = lua_tostring(L, -1);
		if (label && !*label) label = "---";
		if (label) menu[i - 1] = strcpy(malloc(strlen(label)), label);
		lua_pop(L, 1); // label
	}
	return menu;
}

void popup_menu(void *menu, void *userdata) {
	const char **labels = menu;
	int n = 0, width = 0;
	for (n = 1; labels[n]; n++) width = fmax(width, strlen(labels[n]));
	int location[n];
	for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) location[i] = LEFT;
	CDKSCREEN *screen = initCDKScreen(newwin(n + 2, width + 2, 1, 1));
	const char *m[1][n];
	for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) m[0][i] = labels[i];
	CDKMENU *cdk_menu = newCDKMenu(screen, m, 1, &n, location, TOP, A_NORMAL, A_REVERSE);
	activateCDKMenu(cdk_menu, NULL);
	destroyCDKMenu(cdk_menu), delwin(screen->window), destroyCDKScreen(screen);
}

I also had to update CMakeLists.txt to include menu.c.

Using that snippet I was able to run popup_menu(ui.context_menu) from the command entry to show the menu. Selecting a label does not do anything.

Closing this. The workaround for lack of a menu is Ctrl+P.