EraX

A text editor under active development, written in Rust.

EraX is an experimental multi-modal text editor with GUI, TUI, and stream editing modes. It uses uEmacs-style (not emacs!!) keybindings and aims for a single static binary with minimal dependencies. It aims to be as self-contained as possible.

Status: Alpha (v0.8.0-alpha). Many features are incomplete or experimental. Risk of editor malfunction and data loss are high if you choose to use the editor in this stage.

License

GNU General Public License, version 2 only (GPL-2.0-only).

Features

• Terminal mode (TUI): Interactive editing with crossterm. Supports ASCII, ANSI, and UTF-8 terminals. Also has GPM mouse support for the 3 people in the world who actually use GPM.
• Graphical mode (GUI): GPU-accelerated rendering via wgpu and winit.
• Stream mode (Sed): Basic POSIX-style stream editing for scripting. Also supports "diff-mode" for viewing and approving diffs for sed-style edit commands.
• Syntax highlighting: Rule-based lexer for C, Rust, Python, Go, JavaScript. (no heavy tree-sitter! The highlighting may not be "semantically correct" but it looks pretty and makes code more readable for the 99% of people who don't care about semantic correctness of syntax highlighting.)
• uEmacs-style keybindings: Common navigation and editing commands.
• Multi-window: Basic split window support (vsplit/hsplit).
• Compile time configuration: Configs are parsed and validated at compilation, and compiled into the binary. This reduces runtime clutter and config parsing overhead. Some settings may be available to change on a per-session basis but for the most part you have to re-compile to change your settings. This is a feature. PRs requesting any sort of text based runtime configuration will be ignored. If you want that as a feature fork it and add it yourself.

Building

Requires Rust (stable, Edition 2024).

# Release build
cargo build --release

Usage

# Edit a file in the terminal
erax -u file.txt

# Stream editing
echo "old text" | erax -e 's/old/new/'

# GUI mode (if built with gui feature, this will run as the default mode unless it detects that your environment is incapable of graphics)
erax file.txt

Configuration

Configuration is compiled into the binary via src/user_config.rs. There is no runtime configuration file. I've done my best to make this file easy to read and edit, I'll be working on making it even easier as I polish things up a bit.

Building from Source (I haven't tested this with Make very much, cargo is recommended for the time being.)

git clone https://github.com/bonzupii/erax.git
cd erax
make # Read makefile or run "make help" to read about other build options.
sudo make install # Only if you want to install to your /usr/local/bin directory. otherwise just use ./target/release/erax to run the editor directly

Or use cargo directly:

cargo build --release 
./target/release/erax

Known Limitations

• Some keybindings may not work properly, the ones that do may not work in all terminal emulators.
• Large file performance (>100MB) is largely untested, but for the few large tests I've done it seemed reasonably performant.
• Only tested on Fedora Linux, your mileage may vary on other distros or operating systems. Theoretically it should run on mac or windows but I have not tested it.
• Documentation is incomplete, innaccurate in many places, and not polished.
• Lossy UTF-8 decoding for corrupted/invalid UTF-8 has significant performance issues and is mostly untested at this time. Lossless UTF-8 encoding seems to work fine.
• Syntax highlighting could be smarter and more generalized.
• I've chosen many lightweight but experimental alternatives to heavy IDE features that one would expect in a code editor, these features will be refined and improved in future releases.
• Spellchecker exists but is largely untested in terms of accuracy and functionality. It is very fast and can eat garbage and call it a dictionary. We'll see how that goes.