Notos

Notos is a high-performance, lightweight text editor built with Rust and egui. It combines the minimalist philosophy of classic editors like Notepad with modern, developer-centric features including independent text zooming, smart line numbering, native OS clipboard integration, and a dynamic plugin architecture.

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Key Features

• Extreme Binary Size Optimization: Release binary compiles down to ~1.8 MB through custom runtime font loading, symbol stripping, and dependency trimming (opt-level = "z", lto = "fat").
• Dynamic Plugin System: Modular architecture using notos_sdk to load dynamic libraries (.dll on Windows, .so on Linux, .dylib on macOS) at runtime without recompiling the core application.
• System Clipboard & Context Menu: Full host OS clipboard integration via eframe and arboard. Supports Cut (Ctrl+X), Copy (Ctrl+C), Paste (Ctrl+V), Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Y), and Select All (Ctrl+A) across keyboard shortcuts, the main Edit menu, and the editor's right-click context menu.
• High-Contrast Text Selection: Carefully calibrated text selection styling in both Dark and Light themes ensuring selected glyphs remain crisp and readable without being obscured by background highlight fills.
• URL Detection: Interactive URL detection plugin. Hold Ctrl to underline and highlight detected links, and Ctrl+Click to open them directly in your default browser.
• System Font Loader: Dynamically loads fonts from the host operating system (e.g., Segoe UI, Consolas, Segoe UI Symbol/Emoji on Windows) ensuring full UTF-8 glyph and symbol support without embedding heavy font binaries into the executable.
• Zero Data Loss: Automatically persists session state (opened tabs, active tab, file paths, editor content, cursor positions, and undo history) across application restarts.
• Tabbed Workflow: Clean tab management supporting multiple open files with dirty tracking indicators (*).
• Independent Editor Zoom: Scale editor font size (Ctrl + Scroll, Ctrl + +, Ctrl + -, Ctrl + 0) independently of the UI scale.
• Smart Line Numbering: Line numbers correspond to logical file lines; wrapped soft-lines display empty gutter space for clear reading alignment.
• Dual Themes: Custom-tuned "Bit Grey" Dark Mode designed to reduce eye strain, alongside a high-contrast Light Mode.
• Flexible Word Wrap: Toggle word wrapping dynamically per session.
• Comprehensive Status Bar: Real-time display of cursor position (Line / Column), selection character count, total document length, and line ending mode (CRLF / LF).
• Whole-Word Undo System: Undo and redo operations group changes by words, typing pauses, and block replacements with accurate cursor position restoration.

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Keyboard Shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
New Tab	Ctrl + N or Ctrl + T
Open File	Ctrl + O
Save File	Ctrl + S
Save As	Ctrl + Shift + S
Close Tab	Ctrl + W
Cut	Ctrl + X
Copy	Ctrl + C
Paste	Ctrl + V
Select All	Ctrl + A
Undo	Ctrl + Z
Redo	Ctrl + Y
Find	Ctrl + F
Replace	Ctrl + H
Go To Line	Ctrl + G
Zoom In	Ctrl + Mouse Wheel Up or Ctrl + + / Ctrl + =
Zoom Out	Ctrl + Mouse Wheel Down or Ctrl + -
Reset Zoom	Ctrl + 0 (Defaults to 14pt)
Insert Date / Time	F5
Open URL	Ctrl + Click on detected URL

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Built-In Plugins

Notos ships with a suite of dynamic plugins located in the plugins/ directory:

Plugin	Description	Integration Points
Base64 Tool	Encode and decode selected text or entire document with Base64.	Plugins Menu, Right-Click Context Menu
JSON Formatter	Format (pretty-print) or minify JSON text.	Plugins Menu
URL Detector	Highlights URLs on Ctrl hover and opens links in the system browser on Ctrl+Click.	Real-time Editor Overlay, Plugins Menu
About Notos	Displays application version, build metadata, and system environment info.	Help / Plugins Menu
Case Transformer	Convert text or selection between UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, camelCase, snake_case, and kebab-case.	Plugins Menu, Right-Click Context Menu
Date/Time Stamping	Insert customizable timestamps including ISO 8601, RFC 2822, and Unix epoch.	Plugins Menu, Edit Menu (F5)
Hex Viewer	Dual-pane hexadecimal and ASCII file inspection with byte offsets.	Plugins Menu
Web Tools	Minify JavaScript and CSS, or format stylesheets.	Plugins Menu
Markdown Preview	Real-time split-view Markdown preview supporting CommonMark and Mermaid diagrams.	Plugins Menu

Plugins are dynamically scanned and loaded on startup from:

1. The directory containing rust-notos.exe.
2. A plugins/ subdirectory relative to the executable.

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Installation & Building

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (1.75+ recommended, 2021 edition)

Windows (Automated Build Script)

The repository provides build.ps1 to build the workspace and automatically deploy all plugin DLLs adjacent to the executable:

# Build release binary and bundle plugins
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build.ps1 -Release

# Build and immediately launch Notos
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build.ps1 -Release -Run

# Clean previous build artifacts and rebuild
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build.ps1 -Release -Clean

The resulting binaries will be placed in target\release\:

• rust-notos.exe
• notos_plugin_*.dll

Direct Cargo Build

You can also build using standard Cargo commands:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/appsjuragan/Notos
cd Notos

# Build the main executable and all plugins
cargo build --release --workspace

After building with Cargo, copy the generated plugin DLLs from target/release/deps/notos_plugin_*.dll into target/release/ (or into a target/release/plugins/ directory) so Notos can discover them at startup.

Running Tests

cargo test --workspace

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Architecture

Notos uses a decoupled workspace layout:

rust-notos/
├── Cargo.toml            # Workspace definition and root dependencies
├── build.ps1             # Windows automated build and packaging script
├── notos_sdk/            # Public Rust SDK defining the plugin interface
│   ├── Cargo.toml
│   └── src/lib.rs        # NotosPlugin trait, EditorContext, PluginAction
├── plugins/              # Built-in dynamic plugins
│   ├── notos_plugin_about/
│   ├── notos_plugin_base64/
│   ├── notos_plugin_case_transformer/
│   ├── notos_plugin_datetime/
│   ├── notos_plugin_hex_viewer/
│   ├── notos_plugin_json_format/
│   ├── notos_plugin_markdown_preview/
│   ├── notos_plugin_url_detector/
│   └── notos_plugin_web_tools/
└── src/                  # Core editor application
    ├── main.rs           # Application entrypoint and CLI parsing
    ├── app.rs            # Main eframe application state
    ├── app/              # Application modules (actions, editor_panel, style, etc.)
    ├── editor.rs         # EditorTab and document buffers
    ├── plugin.rs         # Dynamic library loader and plugin manager
    └── ui/               # Menus, status bar, and dialog components

For information on creating custom plugins, refer to the notos_sdk documentation.

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome. To contribute:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/my-feature).
3. Ensure formatting and tests pass (cargo test --workspace).
4. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add my feature').
5. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/my-feature).
6. Open a Pull Request.

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License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

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Credits

Developed and maintained by appsjuragan.