Riss Notes
Everything it does

The honest list, straight from the test plan we run against every build. If it is written here, it works, and somebody checks it on every release.

The session

  • The session is the save. Untitled documents and unsaved edits survive restarts, with content, tab order, pane layout, splitter positions, carets, bookmarks and per-file settings all restored.
  • Autosaves about 1.5 seconds after you stop typing, and flushes on close. Even a hard kill loses at most the last couple of seconds.
  • Safe writes. Saves land beside the file and move into place, so a failed save never destroys the old content. A corrupted session recovers your buffers instead of discarding them.
  • Files changed behind your back get an amber flag and a reload prompt; deleted files get a red flag and live on from the buffer.
  • One instance per profile. Opening a file from the OS lands it in the running window. Separate --profile instances get their own settings and session.
  • Your data is two folders. Settings and session, human-readable, and deleting them is a full reset. No cache, no logs, no registry.

Editing

  • Line operations: sort ascending, descending and unique, remove duplicate and empty lines, trim trailing whitespace, join, duplicate (Ctrl+D), delete (Ctrl+L) and move lines (Alt+↑/↓). One undo step each.
  • Column selection with Alt+drag or Alt+Shift+arrows; typing edits all lines of the block at once.
  • Edit all occurrences (Ctrl+Shift+D): select a word, link every occurrence, and type once.
  • Extend selection (Ctrl+W) grows through word, string, brackets and line; Ctrl+Shift+W shrinks it back the same way.
  • Reading aids: bracket-pair highlight, highlight of other occurrences of the selection, current-line highlight, clickable links, and code folding with Fold All and Unfold All.
  • Bookmarks with a cross-document trail (F2 walks every open file) and a live bookmarks panel that jumps anywhere.
  • Case transforms, insert date and time, go to line, and font zoom with Ctrl+scroll.
  • Indentation detected per file (tabs or 2/4/8 spaces), overridable and convertible either way in one undo step.

Files and formats

  • Encodings that matter: UTF-8 with and without BOM, UTF-16 LE and BE, and Windows-1252, detected at open and shown in the status bar. Re-decode a mojibake file or convert cleanly; saving into a lossy encoding warns you first and offers UTF-8.
  • Line endings shown per document, converted in one undo step, preserved as you type.
  • Highlighting for twenty languages including C, C#, C++, Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, SQL, Shell, HTML, CSS, JSON, YAML, XML, INI and Markdown.
  • Smart detection: known filenames like Makefile, Dockerfile and .env, then extension, then a shebang sniff. The Language menu always wins if you disagree.
  • A themed file browser for Open and Save As, with folder management, full keyboard control, and a path bar that accepts pasted paths.
  • Open Recent (last fifteen), a configurable default save folder, and sane behavior on huge files, binary files and read-only files.

Search

  • Find and replace in the document with match case, whole words and regex.
  • Find in open files searches and replace-alls across every open document, with per-document undo. It searches what is open, not your disk.
  • The rail filter finds open documents by name, wildcard (*.txt) or date (date:week, date:3m).

Panes, tabs, layout

  • Split the editor (F6) into side-by-side panes; move or mirror a document into the other pane, and drag tabs between panes or onto a drop zone to make a new one.
  • Tabs behave: most-recently-used Ctrl+Tab, overflow arrows that never vanish, middle-drag panning, and a close that never silently discards work.
  • The file rail lists everything open with first-line previews for untitled documents, pinning, multi-select batch actions, and a table mode with real created, saved and modified columns.
  • A shared context menu everywhere: close others, compare, reveal in your file manager, open a terminal there, copy path.
  • Keyboard first: Shift+Alt+L jumps to the rail, arrows preview documents, Enter commits, Escape goes back.

Look and feel

  • Six themes that reach every menu, popup and dialog, switched live. The window and taskbar icon recolors itself to match.
  • Live UI scale from 70 to 160 percent with Ctrl+Shift+scroll, no restart. Editor font and interface font are chosen separately.
  • A customizable toolbar built from every menu command, with drag and drop, a pinned zone and a live preview. Or hide it entirely.
  • Distraction-free writing (F11): a ruled page in a fixed column, optional handwriting font, everything else gone until Escape.
  • Rebindable shortcuts with clash checking, applied instantly, and defaults that land where your fingers already expect them.

Tools

  • Format JSON and XML in one undo step, with honest errors on invalid input.
  • Insert date and time, ISO and Unix timestamps, and GUIDs in four formats, singly or by the batch.
  • Base64 encode and decode of the selection, round-tripping non-ASCII exactly.
  • Compare with saved shows a line diff of your buffer against the disk, in a tab or a separate window.
  • Markdown preview (F12) for any document, updating as you type, and Open in Browser for a rendered page.

Platform

  • Windows: a signed MSI installer or a plain ZIP. Every binary is Authenticode-signed, so no SmartScreen drama.
  • Linux: a .deb or a portable tarball that registers its own desktop entry and icons on first run.
  • Self-contained. No runtime to install, no plugins to manage, no telemetry. Releases ship with signed checksums.