Ox is a fast text editor that runs in your terminal.
Ox is a text editor with IDE-like features. It was written in Rust using ANSI escape sequences. It assists developers with programming by providing several tools to speed up and make programming easier and a refreshing alternative to heavily bloated and resource hungry editors such as VS Code and JetBrains. Ox is so lightweight that it can be used on older computers.
It runs in the terminal and runs on platforms like Linux and macOS but doesn't work on Windows directly (it works if you use WSL) due to a lack of a good command line. There are many text editors out there and each one of them has their flaws and I hope to have a text editor that overcomes many of the burdens and issues.
Ox is not based off any other editor and has been built from the ground up without any base at all.
Ox aims to be an editor that takes features from some of the most popular editors out there, gaining the best of all worlds.
Vim http://vim.org: Vim provides a plugin system for adding features to it as it is very minimal and only provides basic text editing functionality by default. It is quite extensive and has its own programming language for configuring and writing plugins for it. It has a steep learning curve due to being a “modal” text editor, having special modes for editing text. Ox is easier to use than Vim because it doesn’t have modes where the keyboard is repurposed, however it takes the idea of being a keyboard-only editor and being able to act just like an IDE after some configuration.
Nano https://www.nano-editor.org/: Nano is an editor that is very simple to grasp due to its intuitive key bindings such as “Ctrl+S” to save and “Ctrl+?” for the help menu etc. Ox took the idea for the key bindings from this editor, they are simple to remember, “Ctrl+F” for “Find”, “Ctrl+Q” for “Quit”, meaning that Ox doesn’t have as steep a learning curve.
Micro https://micro-editor.github.io/: Micro has a plugin system that is programmed with a language called Lua however I can’t seem to find any up to date plugins for it and it lacks features such as a file tree. It is micro that inspired me to add mouse functionality and other features.
Emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/: Emacs is still actively used today due to its freedom to modify and change the source code. Ox took the idea for the customization and extensibility of Emacs and made a configuration system where you can change the colours and appearance of the editor.
Xi https://xi-editor.io/: Xi is also written in Rust but is purely a backend at the moment, I decided to make Ox both a frontend and a backend because Xi has many frontends, but most of them are broken and it lacks a lot of features.
Kiro https://github.com/rhysd/kiro-editor: Kiro is an amazing text editor written in Rust and adds features such as Unicode support, a nicer colour scheme and small things like resizing and it is a very inspiring editor. Ox took the ideas for the improvements from Kiro, however implemented them differently. Kiro’s source code also seems to be quite advanced in some areas, so I decided to keep Ox as simple as I could.
Ox is super minimal and aims to use as few dependencies as possible, allowing for rapid compile time and low risk of breakage.
You can currently only build Ox from source. While this may sound daunting to many people, it really isn't that hard and takes 1 minute worst case scenario!
Because Ox is written in Rust, you must have a modern and working version of rustc and cargo.
On Arch Linux, you can run this command:
sudo pacman -S rustup
rustup toolchain install stableIf you are not using Arch, you can easily set it up on other distros by running the distro-neutral command:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
/usr/bin/rustup toolchain install stableYou must have curl installed in order to run this command.
- Clone the repo and change into it
git clone https://github.com/curlpipe/ox
cd ox- Build Ox
cargo build --release- Copy the binary into your
/usr/bindirectory
sudo cp target/release/ox /usr/bin/oxInstall ox-bin or ox-git from the Arch User Repository.
That's all there is to it!
At the moment, you can open ox by using the command
ox
This will open up an empty document.
If you wish to open a file straight from the command line, you can run
ox /path/to/file
To open and edit a file.
You can also open a file from within Ox by using the Ctrl + O Key binding
If at any time, you wish to create a new file, you can use Ctrl + N to do so.
You can find more command line options for Ox by typing:
ox --help
You can use the arrow keys to move the cursor around
You can also use:
- PageUp - Go to the top of the document
- PageDown - Go to the bottom of the document
- Home - Go to the start of the current line
- End - Go to the end of the current line
You can use the keys Backspace and Return / Enter as well as all the characters on your keyboard to edit files!
The simple keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + S can be used to save the current file and Ctrl + W can be used to "save as" the current file to a specific path.
You can use the keybinding Ctrl + Q to exit Ox.
You can search both back and forth by activating the search feature through Ctrl + F, typing out what you wish to search and then using → or ↓ To search forward and ← or ↑ to search backwards.
If at any time you wish to exit the search feature and return to the location in the document that you were in before activating the search feature, you can press esc on your keyboard, otherwise you can press any other key to exit the search feature and start editing your document at the new location.
As with most text editors, Ox provides a replace / replace all feature Ctrl + R to replace individual occurances and Ctrl + A to replace all occurances at once. Regular expressions are supported in both commands.
Undoing and Redoing in Ox is as simple as Ctrl + U to undo and Ctrl + Y to redo. The changes are commited to the undo stack every time you press the space bar, create / destroy a new line and when there is inactivity longer than a specific period of time. (e.g. Ox will commit to the undo stack after 10 seconds of inactivity, possibly while you pause for thought or a break)
Ox features a configuration system that allows modification and personalization of the editor.
By default, Ox will look for a file here: '~/.config/ox/ox.toml'.
Ox's configuration language is TOML.
There are several default configs in the 'config' folder. You will have to either download one and place it in the default config directory or create your own using the example ones as a reference. The config folder includes the older theme that Ox had before 0.2.3 and the default modern one. If you don't have a config file, don't worry :), Ox will just ignore it if you don't have one and it can ignore individual fields should you just want to use the default values.
If you wish to specify the configuration directory, you can do so using the '--config' option (or '-c' if you prefer). For Example:
ox --config /path/to/my_config.toml file_to_edit.txt
You can see the tasks.todo.md file to see my full plans for the future of the editor!
Here is the current summary
- Initial Research (0.1.0, 0.1.1) [741 lines]
- Basic editing functions (0.2.0)
- Line numbers (0.2.0)
- Searching (0.2.0) [1040 lines]
- Undo and Redo (0.2.1) [1282 lines]
- Input bug (0.2.2) [1278 lines]
- Good command line interface (0.2.3)
- Config files (0.2.3)
- Replacing text (0.2.3) [1549 lines]
- Syntax highlighting (0.2.4)
- Tabs for multitasking (0.2.5)
- Macros (0.2.6)
- Mouse support (0.2.7)
- Auto indentation (0.3.0)
- Prettifier / Automatic code formatter (0.3.0)
- Built In linter (0.3.0)
- Auto brackets (0.3.1)
- Auto complete (0.3.2)
- File tree (0.3.4)
- Start page (0.3.5)
Distributed under the GNU GPLv2 License. See LICENSE for more information.
You can contact me on Discord at curlpipe#1496. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have!