A lightweight Windows text editor for working across a folder full of notes, logs and data files. Point it at a folder, search everything in it, and read or edit whatever comes back.
Written in C++ and rendered with plain GDI. The only dependency is platform-h, the Win32 abstraction it shares with its sibling apps — nothing third-party. It starts instantly and typically uses a few megabytes of memory.
Still a work in progress. (for about 10 years)
- Folder browser — navigate a root folder; create, rename and delete files inline
- Multi-file search — live search across the folder, grouped by file with highlighted matches (
Ctrl+Shift+F) - Four document views — text, Markdown, CSV table and hex, chosen automatically and remembered per file
- Syntax highlighting — C++, Rust, Python, PowerShell and Markdown
- Editing — unlimited undo, word wrap, indent/unindent, spell check
- Utilities — JSON reformat (
Ctrl+R), sort and de-duplicate lines, evaluate a selected expression (Ctrl+E) - Session memory — restores the recent root folders and the last document open in each
Open documents are never closed behind your back: unsaved files stay in memory with their full undo history and are shown in red. You are prompted to save only when changing folder or exiting.
From an x64 Developer PowerShell:
.\dd.ps1 build
dd.ps1 locates Visual Studio, enters the MSVC environment and falls back to the
CMake and Ninja that ship with it, so nothing extra needs installing. To drive
CMake directly: cmake --preset release && cmake --build --preset release.
The platform layer comes from the separate
platform-h repository via FetchContent;
a sibling ../platform-h checkout is used automatically when present.
Output is exe\rethinkify-64.exe (Release) or exe\rethinkify-64d.exe (Debug).
.\dd.ps1 test
Runs the unit tests to stdout without starting the GUI, exiting 0 on success and 1 on any failure. The platform layer has its own suite in the platform-h repository.
- docs/design.md — architecture, views, keyboard reference and configuration
- AGENTS.md — conventions for contributors and coding agents