HUME's Unfinished Modal Editor

"We have no rational grounds to believe that a text editor, however carefully constructed, will ever reach a state we might call "finished". What we observe is a succession of patches, each one arising from the last, connected by habit rather than necessity. We call this progress, but that is merely a custom of thought. The editor presents itself as a cursor, a buffer, a mode. Experience alone guides us. I have written this editor for my own use, and release it without expectation. If it is useful to you, that is a happy coincidence. If it is not, I cannot say I am surprised."

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The pragmatic modal editor.

HUME follows the select-then-act model: first select what you want to change, then say what to do with it. On top of that, it is extensible thanks to its embedded Scheme interpreter and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Why try it

• Extensible to the core. Fuzzy pickers, language server support, live git diff and the undo history graph are plugins written in Scheme, the same language as your config. They ship with the editor: enable them with one line, customize them, or rewrite them to your taste.
• Installs from inside the editor. Language servers, tree-sitter grammars, themes and plugins: each is a single command away, no manual downloads.
• See it before you change it. Selections come first, so every edit starts from something visible on screen. Common changes take fewer keys and cause fewer surprises.
• Paste that does the obvious thing. p reaches for what you most likely meant, and a kill ring keeps your recent deletes and yanks within reach.
• Comfortable with real text. Emoji, accents and other multi-byte characters count as single characters.
• Easy to pick up. HUME ships with an interactive :tutor and the manual teaches you how to migrate from your editor.

Quick start

Grab the archive for your platform from the latest release:

Platform	Archive
macOS (Apple Silicon)	hume-*-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
Linux (x86_64, glibc 2.28+)	hume-*-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Windows (x86_64)	hume-*-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip

See the installation guide to extract and run it.

Getting help

Read the full user manual here, or type :tutor inside HUME for an interactive introduction.

Coming from another modal editor? See Helix, Kakoune, or Vim.

Credits

• Helix: the language definitions, the language servers each language uses and their default settings, and the tree-sitter queries behind syntax highlighting, indentation and text objects.
• Mason: the registry :lsp-install uses to download and install language servers.

License

MIT