Text Editor #

The Text Editor opens text files right in the browser and saves changes back to the file. Users create new text files from the + menu of the file list. The editor is based on Ace and highlights syntax.

Requirements #

The app needs no other services.

Installation #

Open Market from the app menu, search for Text Editor, and click Install. On the command line:

# install the app from the Marketplace; this also enables it
sudo -u www-data php8.4 occ market:install files_texteditor

# only needed if the app is present but disabled
sudo -u www-data php8.4 occ app:enable files_texteditor

Setup #

The app has no settings page, no configuration keys, and no occ commands of its own. These values are fixed in the code:

The normal permissions decide who may edit a file. Without write permission, for example in a share without edit permission, the editor opens the file read-only.

Usage #

• Open: Click a text file to open the editor. In the file's … menu, the entry is Open in Text Editor.
• New file: +, then Text file. The file is first named New text file.txt and opens in the editor right away. The entry is not available in the public link view.
• Save: automatically three seconds after the last change, or right away with Ctrl+S or Cmd+S. An asterisk next to the file name marks unsaved changes.
• Close: click the X on the right of the bar above the editor. Only then does the editor release the lock on the file.
• Public links: The editor also works there if the link has write permission. For password-protected links, the password must already have been entered in the same session.

Open and edit text files such as .txt and .md directly in the browser.

Which files open #

What counts is the MIME type owncloud.online assigns to the file. The editor opens every type that starts with text/, plus JSON, XML, YAML, JavaScript, PHP, and empty files. Syntax highlighting depends on the file extension, for example md, json, xml, html, css, js, php, py, sh, or sql. For other extensions, the editor opens the file without highlighting.

Editing at the same time #

The Text Editor is not a multi-user editor. Two people edit a file one after the other, not together:

1. Lock on open: Opening a file locks it, if the storage supports persistent locks. Others get it read-only, with the note "file is read-only, locked by …" and the name of the person holding the lock.
2. Check on save: If the file has changed since it was opened, the editor does not save and reports "Cannot save file as it has been modified since opening". This way, changes made by others are not overwritten.

Limits and notes #

• The server rejects files larger than 4 MiB: "This file is too big to be opened. Please download the file instead." You cannot change this limit.
• Files in other encodings, such as Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1, are shown converted to UTF-8 but open read-only. This keeps the conversion from changing the file.
• If someone closes the browser tab instead of the editor, the browser warns first. If the warning is ignored, the lock stays until it expires.

Troubleshooting #

The app logs server errors under the name files_texteditor, see Server log and error messages.