a lightweight text editor in rust, after rxi's lite
lite is a lovely idea: a tiny core that draws text and reads input, and a whole editor written on top of it in lua. wisp keeps the idea and rewrites the core -- c, sdl and stb replaced by ~5k lines of safe rust. the lua layer is still lite's, byte for byte where possible, bug-fixed where not. every deliberate difference is written down in DEVIATIONS.md.
- pure rust: winit, softbuffer, swash. the only c compiled is lua itself
- everything you see is lua: views, syntax, commands, plugins -- all of it editable while the editor runs
- one font (jetbrains mono nerd font), one theme (catppuccin mocha, green caret), one binary
- twenty-three languages highlighted out of the box, git's own files and the config formats included
- fifty-three plugins bundled and every one of them on: there is no plugin manager and nothing to enable, because bundling is enabling
- it comes back the way you left it -- splits, tabs, carets, scroll --
and it puts that state in
$XDG_STATE_HOME, not in your repository - opinions about the files it writes: everything wisp saves is utf-8, lf, ends in exactly one newline, and carries no trailing whitespace -- markdown excepted, where two trailing spaces are a line break
- a real terminal in a view: alacritty's vt engine on a polled pty, drawn through the same renderer as everything else
- helix mode, opt in: selection-first modal editing built to what
hx --tutorteaches - images and binaries open in views of their own: an image viewer, and a hex editor for everything else
unsafe_code = "deny", with a single documented exception, and it's lua's fault- the whole editor boots headless in the test suite: 115 of its 235 tests feed it fake input and read the pixels coming back. the screenshots on this page were rendered that way too
wisp is an artifact, not a toolkit: one finished editor, one font, one theme, one binary. the bar it is built against is the monday morning test -- clone, build, and do a week of real work without installing anything or wishing you had a different editor.
the core is frozen. an api added speculatively is forever, so it grows only when a consumer lands alongside it, and everything from here is lua. lsp and ai integration are deliberately out for now, with the door left open and the reasons written down in ROADMAP.md -- the terminal used to be on that list, and it turned out to be the answer to the ai question. no os dialogs, ever.
cargo run --release -- <file or folder>
ctrl+shift+p runs commands, ctrl+p opens files, WISP_SCALE=1.4 overrides
the display scale. the rest the editor will tell you itself.
some help from the clankers went into this. love and care, however, were certainly not missing: every line has been read, questioned, and plenty were sent back.
rxi, for lite -- go star it first.
mit, shared with rxi. see LICENSE.
the bundled font is jetbrains mono, patched by nerd fonts, under the sil open font license 1.1 -- its full text ships beside it in data/jetbrainsmono-license.txt.