Edit Mode

Edit mode turns the Viewer into a text editor. You can make changes to files directly within AZUREAL without switching to an external editor or the embedded terminal.

Entering and Exiting

Edit mode is only available for text files. Pressing e on an image has no effect. For markdown files, entering edit mode replaces the prettified preview with raw syntax-highlighted source (see Markdown Preview).

Visual Indicator

When edit mode is active, the Viewer border changes from a solid line to a dashed line. This provides an immediate visual distinction between read mode (solid border) and edit mode (dashed border), matching the visual language used elsewhere in AZUREAL for mutable state.

Text Editing

Edit mode supports standard text editing operations:

Word-Boundary Wrapping

Long lines are wrapped at word boundaries to fit the Viewer width. The cursor navigates through visual lines (wrapped rows), not just source lines. This means:

• Up/Down moves through wrapped visual lines, not source lines. If a single source line wraps into three visual rows, pressing Down three times moves through all three rows before reaching the next source line.
• Home moves to the start of the current source line. End moves to the end of the current source line.

The wrap-aware cursor ensures that navigation feels natural regardless of line length.

Undo and Redo

The undo/redo stack records each editing action (insertions, deletions, replacements). The stack is capped at 100 entries – once the cap is reached, the oldest entries are discarded as new ones are added.

Undo steps back through the history one action at a time. Redo moves forward through undone actions. Performing a new edit after an undo discards all redo-able entries beyond the current point (standard undo-tree behavior).

Saving

Pressing save opens a confirmation dialog before writing to disk. Confirm with Enter (or y) to write, or cancel with Esc (or n) to return to editing without saving.

Discarding Changes

When you press Esc to exit edit mode while unsaved changes exist, a discard dialog appears:

• Discard (Enter or y) – Discards all changes and returns to read-only view with the original file content.
• Cancel (Esc or n) – Returns to edit mode so you can continue editing or save first.

If there are no unsaved changes, Esc exits edit mode immediately without a dialog.

Syntax Highlighting in Edit Mode

Syntax highlighting remains active during editing. The highlighting cache is invalidated and regenerated per edit version – each time the buffer changes, the tree-sitter AST is incrementally re-parsed and the highlight cache is updated. Crucially, this happens per version, not per frame, so rapid typing does not cause redundant re-parses.

Mouse Support

• Click positions the cursor at the clicked location. The click coordinates are converted from screen space to source-line and source-column, accounting for word-wrap offsets.
• Drag creates a text selection from the click point to the drag endpoint. See Text Selection & Copy for details on selection behavior in edit mode.

Speech-to-Text Integration

When Speech-to-Text is used while edit mode is active, the transcribed text is inserted at the current cursor position rather than being placed in the prompt input. This lets you dictate directly into the file you are editing.