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

https://github.com/mcobzarenco/zee

by siraben • 4 years ago

143 85 4 years ago

github.com

__d2• 4 years ago

so ... Zee Emulates Emacs?

drekipus2• 4 years ago

In rust!

oefrha2• 4 years ago

Supporting Emacs keybindings is like 1% of “emulating Emacs”.

__d2• 4 years ago

Sure, but that makes the name Zeopoe, which isn't quite so snappy.

tekacs• 4 years ago

As a British person, I love that two of the editors written in Rust are now called Zed [1] (how we pronounce 'z') and Zee (how Americans pronounce 'z') respectively.

[1] https://zed.dev/

benatkin• 4 years ago

girvo4• 4 years ago

And the neat part is that the Zed authors created Tree-Sitter, which Zee uses!

krashidov• 4 years ago

hah I thought that Zed had actually released and this was that

ehecatl42• 4 years ago

As a Kiwi, I am eagerly awaiting an editor written in Rust called Zid.

Findecanor• 4 years ago

But you would still spell it "Zea" ...

Iwan-Zotow• 4 years ago

- Whose motorcycle is this? - It's a chopper, baby. - Whose chopper is this? - It's Zed's. - Who's Zed? - Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

drekipus2• 4 years ago

Looks nice. I do like tui editors, I like new editors, I like the "promise" of speed / rtc that comes with rust. I like new and interesting ways of doing things

This looks to be a hobby project, and it looks very professional and presentable, so good work! I like it!

But if you wanted to entice me to download and try it, I'd argue you have to give me something new. I would prefer more reasoning about why things are the way they are (keybinds are done because X). I'd prefer something that can be hacked upon (vim, Emacs, kak, etc all have scripts). I'd prefer something different (the entire window has physic simulation and typing too fast causes a massive loading force on the indents). Etc.

But this is your project, do what you want! well done!

girvo4• 4 years ago

One thing I'd love to see, is a TUI editor that focuses on providing hooks for developers to build deeper integration with various frameworks into the editor and it's autocomplete.

This is something I've wanted back when I was doing professional PHP development, when life was still in black and white. I still reckon it would be useful today.

I started to build exactly that myself, in Nim, but got distracted building the editor itself and eventually moved on to other personal projects. Maybe I should revisit it.

An example, based on the current HN home page, would be htmx integration in HTML editing, that is aware of the rest of your project and how htmx works to give excellent, powerful autocomplete within your bindings. Maybe even have it be able to be aware of the backends route set!

kmarc• 4 years ago

One thing I'd love to see, is a TUI editor that focuses on providing hooks for developers to build deeper integration with various frameworks into the editor and it's autocomplete.

But... Don't they already do that? I am a daily vim user and there is a million plugins that were created using those "hooks" you talk about. I guess that's the case with emacs too.

Just two days ago I jumped into a huge bazel project and needed a good way to navigate through 100s of files that are connected through @funny//labels/across/directories/and.files. By only reading vim's :help, I was able to write that 10lines of code which hooks into the existing "go-to-file" or "find-where-this-is-defined" functionality.

(In fact, after "implementing" this feature, I was wondering how I'd do this as a user (not as a plug in author) in any other editors.)

akavel• 4 years ago

Consider taking a look at: https://orbitalquark.github.io/textadept/. It's a rather "old kid on the block" actually, it's quite minimal ("Relentlessly optimized for speed and minimalism over the years, the editor consists of less than 2000 lines of C code and less than 4000 lines of Lua code") and it is crazy extensible; actually in my experience trying it, I found it too much extensible - it was too easy for me to break it while trying to configure it. Anyway, IMO it's a project definitely worth taking a look at. (Note: if it's not immediately obvious from the website, it does have a terminal UI version.)

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Shouldn't autocomplete be provided by LSP these days? It's an interoperable framework, so you can implement it just once for your preferred language/workflow and then just use it anywhere.

mateuszf• 4 years ago

One thing I'd love to see, is a TUI editor that focuses on providing hooks for developers to build deeper integration with various frameworks into the editor and it's autocomplete.

Sounds like emacs in text mode

WhyNotHugo• 4 years ago

One thing I'd love to see, is a TUI editor that focuses on providing hooks for developers to build deeper integration with various frameworks into the editor and it's autocomplete.

Neovim?

rob74• 4 years ago

Not the author, but you can hack on it - you just have to install Rust!

Another editor worth mentioning here is Micro (https://micro-editor.github.io/), written in Go, which is also a TUI editor, is hackable not only because open source but also in the sense you mentioned (with plugins written in Lua), and (exceptionally for a TUI editor) it has the "usual" default keybindings that all of us non-Vim and non-Emacs diehards are accustomed to (Ctrl+S for save, Ctrl+F for find etc. etc.).

rahen• 4 years ago

Last time I tried micro as an alternative to vi, it didn't even implement search and replace. I find most of those alternatives quiet heavy and featureless compared to vi.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

An issue with micro is, that you can’t use the mouse to select, copy, and paste text when SSHing in from a Windows host (easily). I never bothered to read up on why this is an issue for Micro but not Nano, but something is done different.

svnpenn4• 4 years ago

Just look at the readme. It says 100 FPS. Vim isn't even close to that, and Vim sucks with large files.

akho2• 4 years ago

The only benchmark I could find is https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/#editor-benchmar... , showing GVim to be quite a bit better than that. For terminal Vim, terminal latency dominates.

dmd• 4 years ago

Fortunately, I don't type 100 characters per second.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

I think a lot of these new text editors would be well served by making it easy to set emacs/vi/windows keyboard shortcuts if they're trying to reach a wider audience. Once their value is established then the people using them would be more likely to move to the native keyboard shortcuts. I'm talking about switch a flag like "shortcut_keys_config=vim" not setting a hundred shortcuts manually :)

tcmart14• 4 years ago

Even though I am a fan of emacs keybindings, a really good example of this is when launching spacemacs for the first time where it prompts the user if they want Evil mode (vi keybindings) or Holy mode (emacs keybindings).

yewenjie2• 4 years ago

Can I please keep all my Emacs workflow and packages but have something faster? Please?

db48x• 4 years ago

If your Emacs is slow then there is probably something wrong with your config that can be fixed. When do you notice it being slow?

ashton314• 4 years ago

Are you on Emacs 28? Native-comp is enabled by default and it's Just Worked™ for me. Or are you on at least Emacs 27? Emacs 27 added native JSON parsing; stuff like lsp-mode works a lot better now.

(Personally running Emacs 29 built from source on an M1 Pro; everything is instant! Even on my old dumpy i5 machine, everything except startup was pretty snappy, with the exception of startup which took ~4 seconds.)

If it's startup you're concerned about, try the esup[1] package to figure out what's taking so long.

[1] https://github.com/jschaf/esup

oefrha2• 4 years ago

Just use a persistent Emacs server and forget about startup profiling.

yewenjie2• 4 years ago

I am on latest Emacs master with native-comp enabled on a i7 32GB machine. While generally it is fast, it is not fast enough for me for things like editing with LSP enabled. After like an hour of LSP mode on, it becomes jarring and I need to restart it.

accelbred• 4 years ago

Have you tried using the gcmh package? I'd gotten emacs 28 snappy and without performance issues on my desktop, but laptop was still laggy; gcmh with auto set fixed it for me.

CyberRabbi• 4 years ago

What makes this a “modern” editor? When does it cease to be a modern editor?

wmf2• 4 years ago

I guess because it's non-modal.

DerSaidin• 4 years ago

https://kakoune.org/ is modal, and imo it would be reasonable to call it modern.

Perhaps "modern" in the terminal editor space is just a codebase that does not have 30 years of cruft (where cruft may include various legacy support and fixes for subtle/obscure/legacy bugs).

Saint_Genet• 4 years ago

Emacs isn't modal

liberty-bzmh• 4 years ago

"rust"

wpm• 4 years ago

One of these days I’m going to write a modern HN headline generator, in Rust!

a9h74j• 4 years ago

Of the Rust, by the Rust, for the Rust.

timeon• 4 years ago

Comments like these reminds me how huge number of vegan recipes went from word 'vegan' to 'plant based' because of omnipresent harassment. And I already saw Rust project here that instead of mentioning 'Rust' in title went for 'oxidized'.

amelius• 4 years ago

Rust in peace.

grinchygrinch• 4 years ago

It seems like lately every new(ish) piece of software is labeled as modern, fast and simple.

rgoulter• 4 years ago

https://github.com/mcobzarenco/zee#features

Stuff like use of tree-sitter seems neat.

gigatexal• 4 years ago

Very cool looking editor. Even this vim diehard will give it a shot. I’m always looking for anything new or an improvement that could make life better.

I don’t love the emacs bindings but I’m open minded.

Again kudos to the author.

johnisgood• 4 years ago

I wanted to give this a try but...

   Compiling zee-grammar v0.2.0 (/tmp/zee/grammar)                                                                                                               
   Compiling crossclip v0.7.0                                                                                                                                                         
   Compiling phf_codegen v0.8.0                                                                                                                                                       
   Compiling futures v0.3.17                                                                                                                                                          
   Compiling palette v0.5.0                                                                                                                                                           
   Compiling zi-term v0.2.0

The following warnings were emitted during compilation:

warning: cc: error: languages/tree-sitter-css/src/parser.c: No such file or dire ctory warning: cc: fatal error: no input files warning: compilation terminated. warning: cc: error: languages/tree-sitter-css/src/scanner.c: No such file or directory warning: cc: fatal error: no input files warning: compilation terminated.

error: failed to run custom build command for `zee-grammar v0.2.0 (/tmp/zee/grammar)`

Caused by: process didn't exit successfully: `/tmp/zee/target/release/build/zee-grammar-38a42fe479d4b0dd/build-script-build` (exit status: 1) --- stdout cargo:rustc-link-lib=static=tree-sitter-css TARGET = Some("x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu") OPT_LEVEL = Some("3") HOST = Some("x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu") CC_x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu = None CC_x86_64_unknown_linux_gnu = None HOST_CC = None CC = None CFLAGS_x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu = None CFLAGS_x86_64_unknown_linux_gnu = None HOST_CFLAGS = None CFLAGS = None CRATE_CC_NO_DEFAULTS = None DEBUG = Some("false") CARGO_CFG_TARGET_FEATURE = Some("fxsr,lzcnt,pclmulqdq,popcnt,rdrand,sse,sse2,sse3,sse4.1,sse4.2,ssse3") running: "cc" "-O3" "-ffunction-sections" "-fdata-sections" "-fPIC" "-m64" "-I" "languages/tree-sitter-css/src" "-Wall" "-Wextra" "-w" "-o" "/tmp/zee/target/release/build/zee-grammar-76ca683c42d5d7dd/out/languages/tree-sitter-css/src/parser.o" "-c" "languages/tree-sitter-css/src/parser.c" cargo:warning=cc: error: languages/tree-sitter-css/src/parser.c: No such file or directory cargo:warning=cc: fatal error: no input files cargo:warning=compilation terminated. exit status: 1 running: "cc" "-O3" "-ffunction-sections" "-fdata-sections" "-fPIC" "-m64" "-I" "languages/tree-sitter-css/src" "-Wall" "-Wextra" "-w" "-o" "/tmp/zee/target/release/build/zee-grammar-76ca683c42d5d7dd/out/languages/tree-sitter-css/src/scanner.o" "-c" "languages/tree-sitter-css/src/scanner.c"

Not interested enough... :/ Took long enough to compile with its ~260 dependencies. Each Rust project I want to cargo build, I end up fetching & compiling >200 dependencies (the same ones, not sure if different versions though), and then by the end of it all it fails.

I am going to rm -rf it, I need the space anyways.

schipplock• 4 years ago

you probably forgot to init the git submodules: https://github.com/mcobzarenco/zee#building-from-source

0xhh• 4 years ago

Looks cool but Zee is a registered trademark and it operates TV channels, OTT platform in India. May be check this again because you shouldn't get into any troubles in the future. :)

wmf2• 4 years ago

Every word is a trademark somewhere.

eesmith• 4 years ago

Most trademarks only apply to a given, well, trade. These are specified when filing for a trademark.

For example, the Unix line of washing solutions (http://www.washing-solution.de/en/washing-machines/unix/ ) and the Unix line of curtains (https://www.kvadrat.dk/en/kinnasand/products/curtains/6704-u...! ) and the Unix line of liquid chromatography products (https://www.sepax-tech.com/Unix.php ) do not infringe on the Unix trademark related operating systems.

According to TESS, the US trademark search system, Unix in the category "IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: COMPUTER PROGRAMS, * NAMELY, TEST SUITES USED TO DETERMINE COMPLIANCE WITH CERTAIN SPECIFICATIONS AND STANDARDS *. FIRST USE: 19721214. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19721214"

There is no trademark conflict to use that term for a far different product or service area.

FWIW, TESS says the following are three of the many existing trademarks for "Zee" in the US:

"IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Camera hardware systems for IP (Internet protocol) video surveillance; IP (Internet protocol) cameras. FIRST USE: 20130809. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20130809"

"IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Educational services, professional educational orientation services, organization of expositions with educational or cultural purposes"

"IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Portable chargers, namely, batteries with multiple ports for charging electronics; Portable power station, namely, batteries with multiple ports for charging electronic devices; Portable battery power station, namely, rechargeable batteries with multiple ports for charging electronics; Battery charge devices; Batteries, electric"

You'll notice they are in different areas of trade, hence no trademark conflict.

Maybe check out trademark law again. :)

throwaway684936• 4 years ago

Irrelevant not only because it's a foreign country but because it's two different fields (television channel vs. computer software).

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

I love text editors. Can someone create one which can also work with the vs code extension API? I would pay for something like that.

scns• 4 years ago

You can sponsor CoC.

https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

systemz• 4 years ago

Please add binary to releases on github. Probably most of the users won't be Rust devs with cargo already available in path.

FullyFunctional• 4 years ago

Ha, writing a minimalist editor is one of my "hello world" tasks and I've been meaning to redo it in Rust as so many things would be much easier than in C.

The major thing I would want differently, breaking tradition from emacs is not waste the bottom two lines for modeline and a usually-empty prompt line and instead only show it on demand. Emacs can sort of do this, but in my experience, it doesn't work very well.

ADD: I know some HNers feel there's too much Rust here, but let me just add how I love that I can do `cargo install zee` on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux (AMD64, Arm64, RISC-V) and it just works. Cargo is my favorite package manager (where available).

davidkunz2• 4 years ago

There's also Helix, a Vim/Kakoune-inspired text editor written in Rust: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix

sp33der89• 4 years ago

Big fan of Helix and Kakoune-esque keybindings! I like that they have tree-sitter and LSP as first class citizens, both extremely nice.

I hope they figure out the plugin system, but honestly, if they'd just add something like Telescope(an absolutely amazing neovim plugin), I'd be more than happy enough.

davidkunz2• 4 years ago

I think there is something like Telescope, e.g. when you hit <space>-f to find files.

SuperSandro2000• 4 years ago

Those new editors gross like weed. Every month there is a new shiny one which promises to be the new vim.

codethief2• 4 years ago

The README sounded very good, until

The following keybindings are available:

Sigh. Could software please stop being so opinionated when it comes to keybindings? Let me configure my own keybindings please. Emacs bindings are terrible for people suffering from RSI and the like.

jhoechtl• 4 years ago

So the next time I ssh into a machine, fire up vim and `dd` to delete a line I find myself cooking coffee because the admin thought that would be the right thing to?

dataangel2• 4 years ago

Your keybindings and the admin's keybindings don't have to be the same. Also yes as someone with RSI I will bother syncing those bindings to every machine I work on because if I don't I will experience physical pain.

vaylian• 4 years ago

Should all software come with no assigned key bindings? I think it is good to have a list of existing key bindings, so that you can start using the software without guessing which keys you need to hit. The don't-know-how-to-quit-vi-jokes are very old by now.

And there's probably some way you can configure the key bindings to your liking.

codethief2• 4 years ago

And there's probably some way you can configure the key bindings to your liking.

AFAICT there is no such way, hence my original comment.

Should all software come with no assigned key bindings?

Personally, I find it very annoying having to re-bind all the keys to my liking / to what I'm used to whenever I start using a new piece of software. But to answer your question: Probably not. Most people seem to be happy to go with whatever are the default keybindings, so I guess it works for them.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

evil mode is a lifesaver in emacs :)

amne• 4 years ago

anyone have a link to hackernews .. but in rust? thanks

mr90210• 4 years ago

Rust is the new Javascript... (I am joking)

bjoli3• 4 years ago

I see a bunch of editors using ropes. Are they in any way superior to RRB trees? My gut tells me no, but ai might be missing something.

cschmidt• 4 years ago

Pragmatically, there is a nice rust crate that implements a rope [1]. I think that has a lot to do with it. And it is a nice data structure for editors.

[1] https://docs.rs/ropey/latest/ropey/

bjoli3• 4 years ago

Of course. The rrb tree implementation in im.rs handles inserts in a way that might lead to the same problems of ropes, but without doing any rebalancing.

That would make it unsuitable for text editor usage.

aledue• 4 years ago

Are there any accessible explanations of RRB trees? I tried implementing them a while ago but all I could find was a something-hundred pages thesis and a paper with some Scala code that I didn't fully grasp ;)

bjoli3• 4 years ago

The simple explanation is "take the bit partitioned immutable vectors and relax the leftwise dense requirement" and then sprinkle some magic implementation dust in between that and the finished implementation.

On a more serious note: the only complex piece of code to write is the merge and split operations, but since the structure of the tree is given it isn't theoretically hard. It is just a pain in the ass.

There are two high quality implementations. One for c++ (immer) and the one in scala.

Bagwell did a talk about it on YouTube as well.

dataangel2• 4 years ago

plugin support? pretty much required for accessibility reasons for me to try an editor

sylware• 4 years ago

I wonder where is the x86_64/elf bootstrap rust optimizing compiler written in rust (user space "profile" for now).

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

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