RType – basic text editor

Writing texts with word wrap

RType is a minimal text editor designed to support basic text processing. My main goal was to learn how to create an application of this kind from scratch. Although the program should be regarded as experimental, it can still be used for tasks typically handled by Notepad-like editors, such as writing short memos.

A notable feature of RType is automatic (screen) line wrapping. In the early days of the PC industry, some text editors worked like typewriters: line breaks had to be inserted and removed manually by user. In my view, automatic word wrap was a major advance, more important than features such as auto-insertion or even spell checking.

The name RType pays tribute to Typer, an educational program introduced in Charles Petzold’s well-known book Programming Windows. RType has been written in the Windows SDK style described in that book.

With a few exceptions, the application uses only components that were already available in Windows 2000, or even Windows 3.0/3.1 if we ignore the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit APIs. Text output is handled by GDI functions. Some of these functions were later reimplemented by Microsoft. Nowadays, the simple TabbedTextOut call involves much more internal processing than it did in the 1990s, but the API itself remains extremely stable.

The program consists of a single file and runs out of the box.

Version	Size	OS	Platform
1.0	114,5 K (117 248 bytes)	Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10	32-bit
RType32.exe
MD5: be45c73e4f9a539212aa3fec0f505355 SHA-256: c6ea849f4cc52e67842a18390390fbedc243e753925ef3aa902b6c6ff134bfe3
1.0	130,5 K (133 632 bytes)	Windows 7, 8, 10	64-bit
RType64.exe
MD5: d8f6fc163e1caef4fea632b6178381b4 SHA-256: 79498a0de9d1a5fdcb55174508fc7c0d5622e8c6c1ae9ae2ef8ba955e236020f