A simple text editor written in C.
Loki is inspired by antirez kilo and its development started following the tutorial Build your own text editor.
It started as a learning project and aims to become a complete text editor for coding.
To build Loki you need to have gcc compiler installed
Build an optimized binary:
make releaseBuild a debug binary:
makeThe created binary is called loki, you can then move it to a directory inside your $PATH
loki <filename>If a filename is not specified, Loki will create a new buffer.
- Ctrl-Q -- exit
- Ctrl-S -- save
- Ctrl-F -- search in current buffer
- Ctrl-N -- jump to next search result
- Ctrl-P -- jump to previous search result
- Ctrl-C -- copy
- Ctrl-V -- paste
- Being lightweight on resources
- Simple and intuitive, with common keybindings
- No configuration (see Appendix)
- Support for LSP for code navigation, code completion and marking of warning/errors
- Support for git for diffs and blame
- Having fun programming it (Appendix)
Thanks to Salvatore Sanfilippo for inspiring the development of Loki.
Thanks to Paige Ruten for the beautiful tutorial Build your own text editor.
Licensed under MIT license.
The main reason I'm developing Loki is because I think that text editors are very cool peaces of software, and I thought it would be fun to learn how to develop one. I don't think that the world needs another text editor, but I feel frustrated by modern, heavy and inefficient editors. Apart from the inefficiency, however, some of those text editors do their job (and sometimes they even do a lot more than they should), and the fact that they're resource-heavy seems to have become an acceptable trade-off in the modern world. But I like simple and minimal things, and it's really frustrating for me to use a software with a lot of useless functionalities and a thousand ways to configure it. Morover, depending on something very complex makes you believe that you need that complexity. I want to bring Loki to the point where I will not need to use one of those complex editor anymore. Loki wants to be simple but functional, light but complete, a minimal and stress-free code editor. Last but not least, I want to have a lot of fun programming, maybe this is the most important reason for me to keep on developing it.
Being aware that this is just another text editor among many, and knowing that the world doesn't really need it, i know that probably I will be the only user of Loki. For this reason, I believe that having the possibility of configuring it, perhaps through a configuration file saved somewhere, would mean to introduce an unnecessary overhead. Maybe in the future I will introduce a way to configure it using a header file (Like Suckless software does), but this is not one of my main goals.
As I said before, I like simple things, and C is a simple programming language that allows you to be very creative. I'm aware of the various risks that programming in C involves, but I can't stop using it. C makes me enjoy programming in a way that modern and safer programming languages can't. It forces me to think in a "low-level" way, and pushes me to find my own solutions to problems. Moreover, I like old things. They have charm, there is something ritual about them. They carry the legacy of past generations. I know it sounds like a paradox, but I feel safe when I use them. And I feel cool when I use C.