Jern - a simple and secure journaling tool

[HoofedEar]

Hey I just wanted to share what I made with Terminal.Gui :) it’s a very simple text editor that is meant for journaling, and encrypts entries securely. I made it as a tool for myself to use on a flash drive that I keep with me. Let me know what you think!

https://github.com/HoofedEar/Jern

[tig]

This is excellent. We should figure out why the keyboard shortcuts are not working on Mac.

[tznind]

Nice little program! Thanks for sharing. I had a play with it and its cool.

It would be nice if on boot the first time (when there is no .k file), it prompted you to enter a key name.

Prompting (Yes/No/Cancel) to save changes on quit (Alt+Q) would be cool too.

Thanks for referencing back to Terminal.Gui in the about box/readme ❤️.

[HoofedEar]

Just curious, is there a Discord? I'd like to start work on adding changes and ideas that people had, but I don't want to spam the Discussions board with questions x) Maybe I can just keep my questions to this main thread?

[tig]

Spam away in Discussions or here! Both are fine.

[HoofedEar]

Okay I'm encountering an exception that I believe has something to do with how I am switching between Windows

So I have this in my Program.cs file:

if (File.Exists("RENAME_ME.k"))
{
    Application.Run<RenameKey>();
}
else
{
    Application.Run<MainWindow>();
}

And inside of RenameKey, I do this to switch back to MainWindow:

Dispose();
Application.Run<MainWindow>();

The error I get is when my application loads RenameKey, then runs MainWindow. Everything seems to work fine, until I try to use a MessageBox.Query. This section throws a NullReferenceException "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." but only after I click "Cool" in the message box. And this only happens when my application runs RenameKey -> MainWindow. If it's just running the MainWindow, it works just fine.

var _ = MessageBox.Query(50, 8,
            "About", "Version 1.1\nCreated by HoofedEar\nhttps://hoofedear.itch.io/jern\nPowered by Terminal.Gui",
            "Cool");

I tried to display the Rename window as a dialog before, but I ran into an issue where it would leave an artifact in the window if you moved it around and yada yada haha I'm sure I'm doing something funky which is causing this. Any advice on how to better do this? Thank you!

[BDisp]

Instead of:

Dispose();
Application.Run<MainWindow>();

do:

Application.RequestStop();

I didn't see the @tznind answers, sorry for that. You don't need to run again Application.Run<MainWindow>(); because it was already loaded as @tznind said.

[tznind]

And inside of RenameKey, I do this to switch back to MainWindow

Normally to close a modal window and return to the previous window that was running you should just use:

Application.RequestStop();

And you don't want to manually dispose of windows. The framework will automatically call dispose on them for you as long as they were running/added to the closing window.

I tried to display the Rename window as a dialog before, but I ran into an issue where it would leave an artifact in the window if you moved it around and yada yada haha I'm sure I'm doing something funky which is causing this. Any advice on how to better do this? Thank you!

This sounds like a seperate issue. If you are able to create a repro we can probably advise on what is causing artifacts after close. Or fix it if it is a bug.

[HoofedEar]

Ah that worked! Thank you! haha I just assumed that it would kill the entire application with that statement, but good to know!

[dodexahedron]

As a tip for grokkability, you could always alias Application, while in the context of anything that isn't actually the "application" from your PoV.

Calling the alias something other than application, whether you do it with a local variable reference or with a using, is a totally valid way of helping yourself out with things like that in General. 🙂

As long as it's the right reference and is appropriately scoped, you won't run into any GC issues or anything, and TG won't even know you did it.

Or, you can do a using static Terminal.Gui.Application; and then call it without the Application qualifier, as if it were locally scoped in that file (so just Run<T>() instead of Application.Run<T>() etc for static members).

[HoofedEar]

Not sure if this is already known, but I noticed when running my application on macOS 14.5, after upgrading it to .NET 8 and version 1.17, the top and bottom parts of the window look weirdly cut off:

I'm spinning up a Windows 11 VM right now but last I looked, I don't this this issue is present on Windows

[dodexahedron]

Same.

I get it seemingly at random in tmux and screen sometimes, too.

Happens outside of them, too, if I've run some other program in the session that may have been badly behaved or if I piped some output from something that might not have been plain text.

I don't think there's anything we can really do about it, without a full terminal reset.

[BDisp]

I'm convinced that is a terminal related.

[dodexahedron]

I concur completely.

While we may have something, somewhere that exacerbates it, I don't think we are ever the first place that the broken behavior starts.

[BDisp]

It seems to me that it is not respecting a fixed-size font if it is not processing simple Ansi characters, handling lines (-) as spaces that do not count towards cursor advancement.

[HoofedEar]

I'm sure it's been noted already but this seems to be fixed in the latest v1 version, so thanks for that! :)

[HoofedEar]

Would now be a good time to transition to v2?
I did some work today to attempt migrating (using the latest prerelease version listed: 2.0.0-prealpha.1829)
And so far it was straight forward! The only thing I'm having trouble with is moving to the new StatusBar/Shortcut and Commands stuff.

Here is the old code:

Here is the new code:

However I noticed that when I press Esc, it doesn't call my SaveBeforeQuit method. So I realized I needed to do something different using Keybindings?
Basically, I'm confused about how to remap command keys (I noticed that I could do something like AddCommand) and how I can use an async method with it? I noticed it requires a nullable bool but does true mean success and false mean failed? (I found this https://gui-cs.github.io/Terminal.GuiV2Docs/api/Terminal.Gui.View.AddCommand.html in the docs but couldn't find anything about that)

I like the new changes using keybindings, just need some guidance on how how to adapt here haha thanks!

[HoofedEar]

Hey thanks for the clarification! Haven't had a chance to get back to looking at this but I'm hoping to take another look at it tomorrow 👍

[HoofedEar]

Ah figured it out. Instead of having to use Key.AltMask | Key.S, I needed to use Key.S.WithAlt, but now I can use WithCtrl and the shortcut actually works as intended on MacOS so that's nice!

[HoofedEar]

Is there a way to programmatically set specific settings? I basically just want to force dialogs to center their buttons, globally in the application. I'd like to avoid using an external .config file if at all possible

[tig]

Yes, you can set, for example, Dialog.DefaultButtonAlignment which is static. You'll need to do it after Init.

I recommend, though, that you use a .config file and put in your apps /Resources. See how UI Catalog does this.

This way, users of your app can override your settings if they want.

Note that the final look & feel for v2 is not settled and we'd love your feedback. If all devs start centering dialog buttons because we choose the default wrong that would be a shame. See

• Finalize v2 Default Visual Style  #3493

And feel free to voice your opinions there!

[HoofedEar]

Thanks so much tig!

I'll be sure to post there once I tweak things some more and learn about what look I end up going with. So far just centering the buttons for Dialogs is the only thing I've come across haha