Console text editor

mle

We look at a lot of text editors, and the majority of them are built for the command line. This is surprising considering how well established Emacs and Vim are – they've both been around for decades, as has our collective muscle memory for using them. But developers must feel there's still room for improvement because they keep creating new editors, and that's the case with mle. Compared to Emacs and Vim, mle is a tiny project with a tiny codebase. But this is also its unique selling point, plus the ability to easily hack on the code, which is what differentiates mle from its inspirations. The main project code is only 10,000 lines of code, which is remarkable. The best thing about mle is that code scarcity does not affect usability. After running from your terminal, mle looks and operates like a fully fledged and perfectly capable editor. The low typing latency and response feel fantastic, and it's all expandable, scriptable, and completely configurable.

The main view looks like a terminal editor with the numbers feature turned on. It suffers from the ancient Vim problem of not helping the user at all, but standard desktop shortcuts work for most functions. Ctrl+X will quit, for example, while F2 will load the help text into the editor. This is a great place to start, followed maybe by Alt+V to split the view vertically and start working on your own documents while the help text remains visible. But built-in, mle supports syntax highlighting, keycap layers, macros, regular expressions for search and replace, and the ability to load very large files. Rather than reinvent many wheels, extra functionality is piped to external tools and incorporated in the main application, such as movement via less, fuzzy search with fzf, file browsing with tree, and searching with grep. These tools are seamlessly integrated with the main application, and using external tools like this is a refreshing approach. Even cynical editor stalwarts can't help but be impressed.

Project Website

https://github.com/adsr/mle

Mle is a rare breed of tiny text editor that is also powerful. It can even be built as a static binary for easy portability and compatibility.

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