Kibi: A text editor in ≤1024 lines of code, written in Rust

A configurable text editor with UTF-8 support, incremental search, syntax highlighting, line numbers and more, written in less than 1024 lines[^1] of Rust with minimal dependencies.

[^1]: Counted per platform, excluding tests and Clippy directives, see count_loc

Kibi is compatible with Linux, macOS, Windows 10[^2], and WASI.

[^2]: Kibi requires the terminal to support ANSI escape sequences. Windows 10 version 1703 (Creators Update, April 2017) and above are supported.

This project is inspired by kilo, a text editor written in C. See comparison below for a list of additional features.

Contributions are welcome! Be careful to stay below the 1024-line limit...

Table of contents

• Installation
  • With cargo
  • Arch User Repository (Arch Linux)
  • Android (with Termux)
  • Fedora/CentOS
  • NetBSD
  • Flatpak
• Usage
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Configuration
    • Global configuration
    • Syntax highlighting
• Comparison with kilo
• Contributing
• Dependencies
• Why Kibi?
• Contributors
• License

Installation

With cargo

You can install Kibi with cargo:

cargo install kibi

Syntax highlighting configuration files are available in the syntax.d directory of this repository. They need to be placed in one of the configuration directories mentioned in the Configuration/Syntax Highlighting section.

For instance:

cd ~/repos
git clone https://github.com/ilai-deutel/kibi.git
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/kibi/
ln -sr ./kibi/syntax.d ~/.local/share/kibi/syntax.d

Arch User Repository (Arch Linux)

3 packages are available on the AUR: kibi and kibi-bin. kibi-git.

1. Installation with an AUR helper, for instance using paru:

   paru -Syu kibi
   

2. Install manually with makepkg:

   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/kibi.git
   cd kibi
   makepkg -si
   

1. Installation with an AUR helper, for instance using paru:

   paru -Syu --pgpfetch kibi-bin
   

2. Install manually with makepkg:

   gpg --keyserver keys.openpgp.org  --recv-keys 102588418FF7E165696490A206E8A973494808A2
   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/kibi-bin.git
   cd kibi-bin
   makepkg -si
   

1. Installation with an AUR helper, for instance using paru:

   paru -Syu kibi-git
   

2. Install manually with makepkg:

   git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/kibi-git.git
   cd kibi-git
   makepkg -si
   

Android (with Termux)

Kibi is available as a Termux package.

1. Install Termux:

   

2. Install Kibi within Termux: pkg install kibi

Fedora/CentOS

The package is available in COPR as atim/kibi.

sudo dnf copr enable atim/kibi -y
sudo dnf install kibi

NetBSD

Kibi is available from the official repos.

Install using:

pkgin install kibi

or build from source:

cd /usr/pkgsrc/editors/kibi
make install

Flatpak

Kibi is available on Flathub.

flatpak install flathub com.github.ilai_deutel.kibi

You can then run Kibi with:

flatpak run com.github.ilai_deutel.kibi

Usage

kibi              # Start an new text buffer
kibi <file path>  # Open a file
kibi --version    # Print version information and exit

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut	Description
Ctrl + F	Incremental search; use arrows to navigate
Ctrl + S	Save the buffer to the current file, or specify the file path
Ctrl + G	Go to <line number>[:<column number>] position
Ctrl + Q	Quit
Ctrl + D	Duplicate the current row
Ctrl + E	Execute an external command and paste its output
Ctrl + R	Remove an entire line
Ctrl + C	Copies the entire line
Ctrl + X	Cuts the entire line
Ctrl + V	Will paste the copied line
Ctrl + ←	Moves cursor to previous word
Ctrl + →	Moves cursor to next word
Ctrl + /	Comment or uncomment the current line

Configuration

Global configuration

Kibi can be configured using a configuration file. It must follow this format:

# The size of a tab. Must be > 0.
tab_stop=4
# The number of confirmations needed before quitting, when changes have been
# made since the file was last changed.
quit_times=2
# The duration for which messages are shown in the status bar, in seconds.
message_duration=3
# Whether to show line numbers.
show_line_numbers=true

The location of these files is described below.

Linux / macOS

kibi follows the XDG Base Directory Specification:

• A user-level configuration file can be located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/kibi/config.ini if environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined, ~/.config/kibi/config.ini otherwise.
• A system-wide configuration file can be located at $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/kibi/config.ini if environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is defined, /etc/kibi/config.ini or /etc/xdg/kibi/config.ini otherwise.

Windows

A configuration file can be located at %APPDATA%\Kibi\config.ini.

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting can be configured using INI files which follow this format:

### /usr/share/kibi/syntax.d/rust.ini ###
# Kibi syntax highlighting configuration for Rust

name=Rust
extensions=rs
highlight_numbers=true
singleline_string_quotes="
singleline_comment_start=//
multiline_comment_delims=/*, */
; In Rust, the multi-line string delimiter is the same as the single-line string
; delimiter
multiline_string_delim="
; https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html
keywords_1=abstract, as, async, await, become, box, break, const, continue, crate, do, dyn, else, enum, extern, false, final, fn, for, if, impl, in, let, loop, macro, match, mod, move, mut, override, priv, pub, ref, return, self, Self, static, struct, super, trait, true, try, type, typeof, unsafe, unsized, use, virtual, where, while, yield
keywords_2=i8, i16, i32, i64, i128, isize, u8, u16, u32, u36, u128, usize, f32, f64, bool, char, str

The location of these files is described below.

Linux / macOS

kibi follows the XDG Base Directory Specification:

• User-level syntax highlighting configuration files can be located at $XDG_DATA_HOME/kibi/syntax.d/<file_name>.ini if environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME is defined, ~/.local/share/kibi/syntax.d/<file_name>.ini otherwise.
• System-wide syntax highlighting configuration files can be located at $XDG_DATA_DIRS/kibi/syntax.d/<file_name>.ini if environment variable $XDG_DATA_DIRS is defined, /usr/local/share/kibi/syntax.d/<file_name>.ini or /usr/share/kibi/syntax.d/<file_name>.ini otherwise.

Windows

Syntax highlighting configuration files can be located at %APPDATA%\Kibi\syntax.d\<file_name>.ini.

Comparison with kilo

This project is inspired by kilo, a text editor written by Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) in C, and this tutorial (also in C).

kibi provides additional features:

• Support for UTF-8 characters
• Compatibility with Windows
• Command to jump to a given row/column
• Handle window resize (UNIX only)
• Parsing configuration files: global editor configuration with validation, language-specific syntax highlighting configuration (38 languages and counting)
• Display line numbers on the left of the screen; display file size in the status bar
• Syntax highlighting: multi-line strings
• Save as prompt when no file name has been provided
• Command to duplicate the current row, to quickly move between words
• Ability to execute an external command from the editor and paste its output
• Support for end-of-options delimiter -- (following POSIX.1-2024 12. Utility Conventions)
• Can be used as the editor for the sudoers file via visudo
• Guaranteed memory safety, thanks to Rust!
• Bug fixes

Contributing

Contributions of any kind are welcome! Make sure to check out the contributing guide: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Dependencies

This project must remain tiny, so using advanced dependencies such as ncurses, toml or ansi-escapes would be cheating.

The following dependencies provide wrappers around system calls.

• On UNIX systems (Linux, macOS):
  • libc
• On Windows:
  • winapi
  • winapi-util

In addition, unicode-width is used to determine the displayed width of Unicode characters. Unfortunately, there is no way around it: the unicode character width table is 230 lines long.

Why Kibi?

1. Porting the kilo source code from C to Rust and trying to make it idiomatic was interesting
2. Implementing new features while under the 1024-line constraint is a good challenge
3. Most importantly, I wanted to learn Rust and this was a great project to start (thanks Reddit for the idea)

Contributors

This project follows the all-contributors specification (emoji key). Contributions of any kind welcome!

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT License

at your option.