This is a small text editor I wrote for my personal use. The design goals are roughly:
- Small and simple, so I can make modifications with understanding.
- Fast, unless it conflicts too much with the previous point.
- Preserve the nice parts of my Emacs experience.
If you want to make this editor yours, there's two options:
-
Use a binary build and customize
editor.config. There's a few starter templates, depending on where you are coming from, but note that these don't map precisely to their source behavior. -
Modify the code and compile your own build.
Make a debug build with:
jai [-x64] build.jai
The binary releases are compiled with:
jai -optimized_debug build.jai - [-no-windows-console] [-bundle]
The build file contains information about more options.
Tested on Jai version 0.2.030.
The code compiles and runs on Windows and macOS (although macOS bundle doesn't work yet). Linux support coming soon.
The editor is written in Jai, which is not publicly available yet. Hopefully it will be soon.
This is an early alpha. Bugs and occational crashes may happen. Save often.
Language support
Only C/C++, Jai, and GLSL are supported right now.
I plan to add support for Rust, C#, TypeScript and Slang soon.
If you want to add support for a language for yourself, look at the existing lang_xyz.jai files.
Performance
-
To help debug tricky parts of the code, expensive paranoid assertions are enabled by default. You can disable these by building with
-no-sanity. They will eventually be disabled by default. -
The parser for indentation and lexers for syntax highlighting need to get faster. The editor turns them off for files above 10 megabytes.
Misc
-
Project search currently shells out to ripgrep. Near-term, more external search tools will be supported (e.g.
git grep). Long-term, project search will be implemented in the editor itself. -
Spawning a process and collecting its output (for compilation or project search) is synchronous for now.
Small bugfixes are accepted, as well as lexers for new programming languages, but if you want to make bigger changes, your own version of the editor would be a better place to do that.
LSPs and MCPs are out of scope. Vim mode too.
- Jonathan Blow, for making the Jai programming language.
- Emacs, for teaching me that I can live without IDEs.
- Emacs, for getting slower and buggier over time, making me do this.
- Focus Editor, with which this editor shares the simplicity philosophy. If I had tried it sooner, I might have just used that.
- My amazing partner, who tolerated me going off on this tangent instead of doing more important stuff.
The editor is in the public domain under the MIT license. You can do whatever with it. Attribution is appreciated.