Text Editor in Visual Basic

Submitted by Yorkiebar on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 03:43.

Introduction: This tutorial is on how to create a basic text editor in Visual Basic. Design: The design for this program is; Button, button1, Save the document. Button, button2, Open a document. Textbox, textbox1, Contain the document text. Imports: The only thing we need to import is System.IO which allows us to access files from the computers FileSystem...

Imports System.IO

Button1 Click: To save a document, we first want to ensure that the textbox1 text is not empty (so there is something to actually save)...

If (Not TextBox1.Text = Nothing) Then
 
Else
        MsgBox("Nothing to save!")
End If

Then if there is something to save, we are going to create a msgbox prompt asking if they want to specify a new save location. If the answer is no, the document will be saved to the path of a variable named 'path' which we are yet to create.

If (Not path = Nothing) Then
        Dim result = MsgBox("Would you like to save to a new location? (No = Save overwrite)", MsgBoxStyle.YesNoCancel, "Save Location")
        If (result = MsgBoxResult.Yes) Then
                Using fs As New SaveFileDialog
                        fs.MultiSelect = False
                        fs.RestoreDirectory = False
                        fs.ShowDialog()
                        If (Not fs.FileName = Nothing) Then
                                Using sw As New StreamWriter(fs.FileName)
                                        sw.Write(TextBox1.Text)
                                End Using
                        End If
                End Using
        Else If (result = MsgBoxResult.No) Then
                Using sw As New StreamWriter(path)
                        sw.Write(TextBox1.Text)
                End Using
        End If
Else
        Using fs As New SaveFileDialog
                fs.MultiSelect = False
                fs.RestoreDirectory = False
                fs.ShowDialog()
                If (Not fs.FileName = Nothing) Then
                        Using sw As New StreamWriter(fs.FileName)
                                sw.Write(TextBox1.Text)
                        End Using
                End If
        End Using
End If

Variables: The path variable I talked about earlier will simply hold the latest opened documents path so that we can offer the overwrite functionality later on. We create this in the global scope (outside of any other subs, functions or classes)...

Dim path As String = ""

Button2 Click: To open a document, we simply give the user a new OpenFileDialog, allow them to select a file, and then read it to the textbox (textbox1)...

Using fo As New OpenFileDialog
        fo.MultiSelect = False
        fo.RestoreDirectory = False
        fo.ShowDialog()
        If (Not fo.FileName = Nothing) Then
                Using sr As New StreamReader(fo.FileName)
                        While (sr.Peek <> -1)
                                Textbox1.Text += sr.ReadLine()
                        End While
                End Using
        End If
End Using

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