Express
C++ Line
C++ Express: Your First 20 Programs
Rated 4.8 out of 5 from 4 reviewsBeginner 20 lessons 611 students
Fare
€9Build a Terminal Text Editor in C++
Write a working text editor that runs in your terminal — raw input, scrolling, search, syntax colours and saving.
Rated 4.5 out of 5 from 2 reviews
- Intermediate
- 28 lessons · 4h 44m of video
- 274 students
- English
- Updated Oct 2026
The route
Curriculum
6 modules · 28 lessons · 4h 44m of video
-
1
48m
Raw mode and keys
5 lessons
-
2
52m
Drawing the screen
5 lessons
-
3
1h 1m
The text buffer
6 lessons
-
4
49m
Editing and saving
5 lessons
-
5
31m
Search
3 lessons
-
6
43m
Syntax highlighting
4 lessons
Destination
What you will be able to do
- Switch the terminal into raw mode and read keys
- Draw the screen with ANSI escape sequences
- Store text in a gap buffer
- Add scrolling, search and syntax colours
- Save files safely with atomic writes
Before you board
You will need
- Comfortable with C++ functions, classes and vectors
- Linux or macOS (Windows via WSL)
About this course
The journey
A text editor is the perfect intermediate project: it touches input handling, memory, data structures and performance, and you use the result every day. You will build one from an empty file, roughly a thousand lines of modern C++, with no libraries beyond the standard library and the terminal itself.
Along the way you learn raw terminal mode, escape sequences, a gap-buffer text model, viewport scrolling, incremental search, a small syntax highlighter and safe saving. Each lesson ends with the editor running, so you always have something that works.
Frequently asked questions
Still unsure about something? Write to our contact page and a human answers, usually the same working day.
Intermediate. You should be comfortable with the basics listed under requirements.
No. You pay once and keep lifetime access, including every future update to this course.
Yes. The preview video at the top of this page shows real code from the course being written and run.
Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.
Email within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.
What students say
Reviews are written by people who bought this course. We publish the critical ones too.
4.5
Rated 4.5 out of 5Course rating · 2 reviews
Rating distribution
- 5 stars 50%
- 4 stars 50%
- 3 stars 0%
- 2 stars 0%
- 1 star 0%
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JLOct 2026
Jakob Lehtonen
Embedded developer
Rated 5.0 out of 5The gap buffer lesson is excellent
I always wondered how editors insert text without copying everything. The gap buffer chapter explained it in twenty minutes and my editor stays fast on big files.
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RLJul 2026
Rosa Lindqvist
Backend developer
Rated 4.0 out of 5Fun project, Windows users need WSL
Loved building it. Raw terminal mode is Unix-specific, so on Windows I had to use WSL — the course says so, but plan for it.
€57
EUR
One-time payment · lifetime access