The xi editor project is an attempt to build a high quality text editor, using modern software engineering techniques. It is initially built for macOS, using Cocoa for the user interface, but other targets are planned.
Goals include:
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Incredibly high performance. All editing operations should commit and paint in under 16ms. The editor should never make you wait for anything.
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Beauty. The editor should fit well on a modern desktop, and not look like a throwback from the ’80s or ’90s. Text drawing should be done with the best technology available (Core Text on Mac, DirectWrite on Windows, etc.), and support Unicode fully.
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Reliability. Crashing, hanging, or losing work should never happen.
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Developer friendliness. It should be easy to customize xi editor, whether by adding plug-ins or hacking on the core.
Screenshot (will need to be updated as syntax coloring and UI polish is added):
You need Xcode 8.2 (only on Mac) and Rust (version 1.13+ is
recommended and supported). You should have cargo in your path. You'll also need
cmake installed, to run the syntax highlighter. If you have homebrew,
easiest to run brew install cmake. It is possible to build without cmake,
but requires some editing of build scripts.
Note: the front-end and back-end are now split into two separate repositories. This is the front-end, and the back-end (or core) is now in: xi-editor. Make sure to have that checked out as a subdirectory.
> git clone https://github.com/google/xi-mac
> cd xi-mac
> git clone https://github.com/google/xi-editor
> xcodebuild
> open build/Release/XiEditor.app
Or open XiEditor.xcodeproj and hit the Run button.
It will look better if you have
InconsolataGo installed, a
customized version of Inconsolata tuned for code editing. You can change fonts
per window in the Font menu or with Cmd-Shift-T. To choose another default font,
edit the CTFontCreateWithName() call in EditView.swift.
The main author is Raph Levien.
We gladly accept contributions via GitHub pull requests, as long as the author has signed the Google Contributor License. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.
This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.