Flow Control: a programmer's text editor

This is my Zig text editor. It is very much a work-in-progress, but far enough along that I am daily driving it.

2024-02-15_15-38-00.-.flow.announcement.mp4

Building

Build with the provided zig wrapper:

./zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

The zig wrapper just fetches a known good version of zig nightly and places it in the .cache directory. Or use your own version of zig. Be sure to use a version at least as high as the version used be the zig wrapper. It's stored in build.zig.version.

Also, make sure your system meets the requirements listed below.

Run with:

zig-out/bin/flow

Place it in your path for convenient access.

See --help for full command line.

Terminal configuration

Kitty, Ghostty and most other terminals have default keybindings that conflict with common editor commands. I highly recommend rebinding them to keys that are not generally used anywhere else.

For Kitty rebinding kitty_mod is usually enough:

kitty_mod ctrl+alt

For Ghostty each conflicting binding has to be reconfigured individually.

Requirements

A modern terminal with 24bit color and kitty keyboard protocol support (kitty and ghostty are the only recommended terminals at this time)
NerdFonts support
Linux or MacOS (help porting to *BSD or Windows is welcome!)
A UTF-8 locale (very important!)

Features

fast TUI interface. no user interaction should take longer than one frame (6ms) (even debug builds)
tree sitter based syntax highlighting
multi cursor editing support
first class mouse support (yes, even with a scrollbar that actually works properly!)
vscode compatible keybindings (thanks to kitty keyboard protocol)
vim compatible keybindings (at least the basics, more to come)
good unicode support
hybrid rope/piece-table buffer for fast loading, saving and editing with hundreds of cursors
theme support (compatible with vscode themes via the flow-themes project)
infinite undo/redo (at least until you run out of ram)
stuff I've forgotten to mention...

Features in progress

LSP support for linting and navigating
find in files
multi tty support (shared editor sessions across multiple ttys)
command palette
completion UI
persistent undo/redo

Features planned for the future

multi host editing
multi user editing

alichraghi / flow