notepad 📒

This is a simple notepad app implemented in pure python, built to replicate windows notepad. Requirements: python 3.6+.

Initialize:

python setup.py install

To run:

python -m notepad

To test (requires pytest):

pytest tests

For help:

python -m notepad --help

Features

• Standard file commands (new, new window, open, save, save as, quit)
• Standard clipboard commands (undo, cut, copy, paste, delete, select all)
• Cursor detection & scrolling
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Status bar, with ability to hide
• Simple theming (light, dark) and "I'm feeling lucky" mode

For developing:

• Detailed & automated debug logging
• Unit testing framework

Philosophy

This is never meant to be a full functional text editor. I originally started this project as an exercise, focusing on purely cloning Windows Notepad. Along the way, I tried to focus on:

• Clean: Inspired by a recent reread of Clean code, I strived for (1) small, maintainable functions that do only one thing, (2) independent classes to manage data structures & abstract away complexities and (3) descriptive names and no unnecessary documentation
• Effort: (Don't reinvent the wheel!) Tkinter is not the most friendly or fun to work with, so I started with this tutorial as a base. Most of this is significantly refactored to remove 100 line init methods.
• MVP First: As I have many projects that I've started but never finished, I wanted to try out a small project using the philosophies in this article. I timeboxed project for 5 hours & limited feature scope. Again, this is not a text editor that should be preferred over any other (yet!), so I didn't build it like one. . I listed out the most core features that I would need to consider this done in the todo file. Along the way, I realized some simple theming was easy, and logging would save me significant time for debugging. Note there's still significant features & bugs left