Zee: A modern text editor for the terminal written in Rust

Zee is a modern editor for the terminal, written in Rust. It is highly experimental code.

In the old tradition of text editor demos, here's what it currently looks like editing its own source code

getting started

The recommended way to install zee using cargo install

$ cargo install zee

features

• The 100 FPS editor. Cursor movement and edits render under 10ms. Everything else happens asynchronously (syntax parsing and highlighting, IO to/from disk, file pickers).
• Buffers are backed by a fast B-tree implementation of a rope (via cessen's ropey).
• Uses Tree-sitter for generating a parse tree from your code. This AST is used for syntax highlighting and on the fly validation. As it is an incremental parsing library, it scales to files with 1 million lines of code.
• multi-buffer, multi-pane -- shared state beats tmux with multiple editors
• fast recursive file search with fuzzy matching and aware of ignore files (using BurntSushi's ripgrep crates walkdir, ignore)
• local file picker with directory navigation
• a pragmatic editor, not a research endeavour into CRDTs

building from source

The editor depends on a bunch of tree sitter parsers, one for each supported language. These are included as git submodules in grammar/languages/tree-sitter-*. After cloning the repository, you have to run

git submodule update --init --recursive

then you should be able to build normally with cargo.

usage

To start the editor run zee. As expected, you can pass in one or multiple files to be opened, e.g. zee file1 file2.

Zee uses Emacs-y keybindings. Below, C- means Ctrl + the specified key, e.g. C-k is Ctrl + k. Similarly A- means Alt + the specified key. Empty spaces denote a sequence of key presses, e.g. C-x C-c means first pressing C-x followed by C-c.

The following keybindings are available:

movement

• C-p, Up move up
• C-n, Down move down
• C-b, Left move backwards
• C-f, Right move forwards
• C-a, Home move to start of line
• C-e, End move to end of line
• C-v, PageDown move down one page
• A-v, PageUp move up one page
• A-< move to the beginning of the buffer
• A-> move to the end of the buffer
• C-l centre the cursor visually

editing

• C-d delete forwards
• Backspace delete backwards
• C-k delete the current line
• C-SPC enter selection mode at the current cursor position
• C-w cut selection
• A-w copy selection
• C-x h select the entire buffer and move the cursor to the beginning
• C-y paste selection (yank in Emacs)
• C-g clear the current selection
• C-z, C-/ undo
• C-x C-s save the current buffer

file navigation

• C-x C-f choose a file to open using a directory-level picker
• C-x C-v search recursively for a file to open from the selected directory
• C-l while opening a file, go to the parent directory
• Tab while opening a file, fills in the currently selected path

global

• C-g cancel the current operation
• C-x 0 close the current buffer
• C-x o, C-x C-o switch focus to the next buffer
• C-x C-c quit
• C-t cycle through the available themes

license

This project is licensed under either of

at your option.

contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.