Text editor based on rxi/lite.
- The editor is mainly a rendering engine built in C and constructed through the supplied Lua API.
- SDL3 is used as the main rendering library.
- stb_truetype is used for font loading
- stb_image and nanosvg are used for image loading
- libgit2 for git support
- Lua 5.5 is the base Lua version.
Features:
- Modern styled command prompt
- Modern styled search in document
- C-native document management (for increased performance -- improvements to come)
- C-native PCRE2 tokenizer with document-owned token caching
- Native LSP integration (basic functionality only - 'click to go to')
- Built-in TTF and OTF font previews
- Built-in image previews with zooming and panning
Document contents, filenames, line endings, file I/O, position traversal, and
text edits are owned by the C document module. The Lua Doc class remains the
editor-facing facade for selections, undo grouping, syntax highlighting, and
commands.
Language plugins define syntax using PCRE2 patterns and symbol mappings in Lua.
The C document module compiles those definitions and tokenizes document lines
directly, while owning multiline state, token caches, and edit invalidation.
Lua only selects and configures the syntax and iterates over the resulting
tokens for rendering.
Native LSP support provides mod-click definition navigation. Holding Ctrl, or
Command on macOS, highlights definitions like links when a language server
can resolve them; clicking jumps to the target. The status bar shows the
configured server for the active document type.
The C lsp module owns server communication and document synchronization,
while Lua selects and configures language servers. clangd is enabled for C
and C++, and gopls for Go; both start lazily when needed.
This is one drift from the original implementation. Alongside the move of most
core logic into native C (like document handling). We're extending the DocView
with a couple of so called presentations, which are basically just different
views for different purposes.
These "specialized" views live under core.presentations and on opening a file
the core.filepresentation selects the proper view to use. Plugins can register
additional filename patterns and open functions with filepresentation.add;
registrations define the order of priority -- last registered being the top one.
Opening a TTF or OTF font displays a scrollable text samples at several sizes. The shown glyphs are based on hardcoded strings defined in the plugin lua code, so they may not match exactly what you'd expect to see (you can check the icons font file used by this editor that is present in the main data/ folder as an example of this).
Editor allows the opening and view of most common types of image formats. This is achieved by the use of the stb_image and nanosvg libraries and with them the Lua api gets image rendering capabilities.
CMake 3.20 or newer is the underlying build system. Configure and build a debug version with:
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build buildUse Release instead of Debug for an optimized build. Some project
dependencies are downloaded by CMake when the build directory is first
configured.
The Makefile provides shortcuts for the common CMake commands:
make # debug build
make release # release build
make run # debug build, then run the editor
make clean # remove the build directoryThis project is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.
You can find the vendored libs and their respective licenses in src/lib.
The bundled Nonicons font is also
MIT-licensed; its copyright notice and license are included in
data/fonts/nonicons.LICENSE.txt.
This project is heavily influenced by some bigger ones, namely, Pragtical and Lite-XL. The biggest motivator being, fred - FRiendly EDitor. Which made me want to do things a bit differently than the other derivatives, in particular, move some of the heavy lifting into the C side in order to implement some of the more advanced and performant technics for text handling while preserving the flexible aspect of using Lua as a configuration and rendering definition.