This is my Zig text editor. It is very much a work-in-progress, but far enough along that I am daily driving it.
2024-02-15_15-38-00.-.flow.announcement.mp4
- A modern terminal with 24bit color and kitty keyboard protocol support (kitty and ghostty are the only recommended terminals at this time)
- NerdFonts support
- Linux or MacOS (help porting to *BSD or Windows is welcome!)
- A UTF-8 locale (very important!)
Make sure your system meets the requirements listed above.
Flow tracks zig master most of the time. Build with:
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
Sometime zig master may introduce breaking changes and Flow may take a few days to
catch up. In that case there is a simple zig wrapper script provided that will download
and build with the last known compatible version of zig. The version is stored in
build.zig.version
.
Build with the zig wrapper:
./zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
The zig wrapper places the downloaded zig compiler in the .cache
directory and does
not touch your system. It requires bash
, curl
and jq
to run.
Run with:
zig-out/bin/flow
Place it in your path for convenient access.
See --help for full command line.
On MacOS you will need to link Flow against a MacOS build of notcurses 3.0.9. This
is easiest with brew
:
brew install notcurses
zig build -Duse_system_notcurses=true --search-prefix /usr/local
Kitty, Ghostty and most other terminals have default keybindings that conflict with common editor commands. I highly recommend rebinding them to keys that are not generally used anywhere else.
For Kitty rebinding kitty_mod
is usually enough:
kitty_mod ctrl+alt
For Ghostty each conflicting binding has to be reconfigured individually.
- fast TUI interface. no user interaction should take longer than one frame (6ms) (even debug builds)
- tree sitter based syntax highlighting
- multi cursor editing support
- first class mouse support (yes, even with a scrollbar that actually works properly!)
- vscode compatible keybindings (thanks to kitty keyboard protocol)
- vim compatible keybindings (at least the basics, more to come)
- good unicode support
- hybrid rope/piece-table buffer for fast loading, saving and editing with hundreds of cursors
- theme support (compatible with vscode themes via the flow-themes project)
- infinite undo/redo (at least until you run out of ram)
- stuff I've forgotten to mention...
- LSP support for linting and navigating
- find in files
- multi tty support (shared editor sessions across multiple ttys)
- command palette
- completion UI
- persistent undo/redo
- multi host editing
- multi user editing
Join our Discord server or use the discussions section here on GitHub to meet with other Flow users!