wi - right after vi

Experimental, do not look into.

Experimental, do not look into.

Experimental, do not look into.

Bringing text based editor technology past 1200 bauds.

Features

• Editor for the 19.2kbps connected world.
• Out of process plugins for today's 2Mb RAM systems.
• Go for both program and macros.
• Fully asynchronous processing. No hang due to I/O ever.
• Extremely extensible. Everything can be overriden.
• i18n ready.
• Auto-generated help.
• go get (Go's native distribution mechanism) for both the editor and plugins.
• Integrated debugging and good test coverage.

Setup

Prerequisites

• git
• Go

Installation or updating

go get -u github.com/wi-ed/wi

Installing or updating a plugin

Plugins are standalone executables or source files that are loaded by wi. wi discovers plugins on startup by looking for wi-plugin-* / wi-plugin-*.exe and wi-plugin-*.go in the same directory ($GOPATH/bin) as the wi executable.

go get -u github.com/someone/wi-plugin-awesome

*.go files are sent to go run for on-the-fly compilation at the cost of slower startup time so there's no native updating support.

Vision

• No I/O done in the UI thread. UI must always be responsive even on a I/O saturated system.
• Very extensible editor with sane default settings.
  • Historical reasons are not good reasons.
• Out of process plugins. If a web browser can render web pages out of process, an editor can do the same.
• Plugins written in the same language as the editor itself. No need to learn yet another language (vimscript? lisp? python? javascript?).
  • The only text editor with statically compiled macros!
• Use instrinsic Go distribution mechanism to distribute plugins. Stable release is go1 branch.
• Broad OS support, including seamless Windows support.
• Unicode used internally.

Contributing

First make sure test-only dependencies are installed with the flag -t then fetch and install pre-commit-go:

cd github.com/<you>/wi
go get -t ./...
go get github.com/maruel/pre-commit-go
pre-commit-go

Once done, you can send pull requests.

A CLA (form to be determined) may eventually be required for contribution.