greenfork / kisa

Text editor of the new world

Kisa

Kisa is a hackable and batteries-included text editor of the new world.

Home repository is on sourcehut but there's also a mirror on GitHub.

Kisa is in its early stage and it is not usable at the moment. See roadmap for the current progress.

There's a growing set of design documents, beware most of it is not implemented.

Purpose

I, greenfork, the one who started this project, would like to have a supreme code editor. I want to edit code with pleasure, I want to know that whenever I feel something is not right - I have enough power to fix it, but with great power comes great responsibility. I shall wield this power with caution and I shall encourage my peers and empower them to follow my steps and eventually let them lead me instead of simply being led.

Zen

• Programmer must be able to perfect their tool.
• Choice is burden.
• Choice is freedom.

Goals

• Provide a powerful and flexible code editor - obvious but worth saying, we should not provide anything less than that.
• Identify common workflows and set them in stone - text editing has become quite sophisticated in this day and age, we have already discovered a lot of editing capabilities. Now is the time to make them easy to use and fully integrated with the rest of the features of the editor, not rely on third-party plugins to emulate the necessary features.
• Adhere to hybrid Unix/Apple philosophy - programs must be able to communicate with each other, the editor must make integrations with other tools possible, this is from Unix philosophy. At the same time the editor must be built from ground-up and have full control of all its core features to provide a single and uniform way of doing things, this is from Apple philosophy.
• Make it infinitely extensible by design, no hard assumptions - the only types of unimplementable features are those which were not accounted for from the very beginning and got hardblocked by design decisions which are interleaved with the rest of the editor, so changing it is not feasible. The solution is simple - layers and layers of abstractions, assumptions are strictly kept to minimum by careful thinking about the public API design of each layer.
• Make it hackable - I believe there are several key points to make an editor hackable: interesting design, clean code, extensive development documentation, friendly attitude to anyone trying.

Communication

• ~greenfork/[e-mail] - readonly mailing list for rare announcements regarding this project, web archive. Subscribe to this list by sending any email to ~greenfork/[e-mail].
• ~greenfork/[e-mail] - mailing list for discussions and sending patches, web archive
• [e-mail] - my personal email address
• Discord - real-time chatting experience
• Twitch - occasional streams including editor development
• YouTube - recordings of past streams and other related videos

Please be kind and understanding to everyone.

Are you new to mailing lists? Please check out this tutorial. There's also the in-detail comparison video of pull requests versus patches.

Contributing

Ideas are very welcome. At this stage of the project the main task is to shape its design and provide proof-of-concept implementations of these ideas. Code contributions without previous discussions are unlikely to be accepted so please discuss the design first. Ideas should be in-line with the current goals and values of this editor. Many ideas will likely be rejected since not all goals and values are identified, but nevertheless they will help us to shape the editor.

For structured discussions please use ~greenfork/[e-mail] mailing list.

How to build

Currently it is only relevant for the development, there's no usable text editor (just yet).

Requirements:

• Zig master, currently https://ziglang.org/builds/zig-linux-x86_64-0.10.0-dev.3685+dae7aeb33.tar.xz
• git

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/greenfork/kisa
$ cd kisa
$ zig build test
$ zig build run

Is this a task for a mere mortal?

Code editor is a big project. I have a habit of abandoning projects, I moderately lose interest to them. I am not religious but God give me strength.

In the interview on Zig Showtime Andreas Kling, the author of SerenityOS, talks about how important it is to lay just one brick at a time. Let's try that.