On Thursday, 9 April 2026 at 01:27:47 UTC, Paul wrote:
Some goals are:
-as little dependency on specific IDE's or compilers, if
possible. Just include all the dependencies on the command
line, if possible.
-long term I plan on loading 100s of text files and having
millions of lines of text to highlight and filter. I feel if
I'm depending on big complex libraries, that optimizing the
viewer will be much more difficult.
Here is 2 hours project - TextViewer using Sciter. Self-portrait
of TextViewer:
[TextViewer
sample](https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/tree/main/sciter%2B/D/demos/textviewer?ref_type=heads) is part of [Sciter SDK](https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/) now. Grab it and run sdk/sciter+/D/demos/textviewer/build-win.bat
While the task sounds simple it has technical challenges:
Loading whole file in memory is no-go. This implementation uses
so called virtual-list - sliding window that loads just portion
of file lines in a view.
Opening and access to a text file is made in D using MmFile class.
### How to do colorization / syntax highlighting
Sciter renders its stuff as HTML and D side, instead of plain
text, may supply to the viewer html fragments. So not plain text
as `"import std.mmfile;"` line but supply html fragment
`"<span.keyword>import</span> std.mmfile;".
Adding then CSS declaration like
```
span.keyword { color:blue; }
```
will make output colorful. If you will decided to go that way
uncomment
[this](https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/sciter%2B/D/demos/textviewer/res/TextTape.js?ref_type=heads#L65-L74).
