Orbiton is a text editor and a simple IDE with the following leading principles:
- Minimal annoyance (within the limits of VT100)
- Not be configurable, to help users stay focused (with the exception of themes)
- Facilitate rapid edit-format-compile-run cycles
Please submit a PR if anything can be improved to help adhere to these.
Orbiton might be a good fit for:
- Writing git commit messages (using EDITOR=o git commit).
- Editing README.md and TODO.md files.
- Writing Markdown and then exporting to HTML or PDF.
- Learning programming languages, like Rust or Zig.
- Editing files deep within larger Go or C++ projects.
- Solving Advent of Code tasks.
- Being placed on a live image for a Linux or BSD distro, since it is limited by VT100, is small and self-contained, has a built-in log, man page and image viewer, has an optional nano/pico mode, comes with a visudo replacement (osudo) and has built-in support for neatly formatting /etc/fstab files.
- Writing any number of words in a distraction-free fullscreen environment (toggle the status bar by pressing ctrl-g to see the word count).
This has been my main editor since early 2022, and it is mostly written in itself, apart from some NeoViM in the early beginning. I spent too much time configuring text editors, IDEs and plugins, so I could just as well create a new one. I wanted something simple, but capable. Hope you like it too!
Screenshots
Screenshot of the VTE GUI application (that can be found in the gtk3 directory), running the o editor:
Stepping through the assembly instructions of a Rust program by entering debug mode with the ctrl-o menu and then stepping with ctrl-n:
Editing a C source file in og using the "synthwave" theme:
There are also light themes available:
Writing commit messages:
Packaging status
| orbiton | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | [](https://repology.org/project/orbiton/versions) |
Quick start
With Go 1.25 or later, the development version of o can be installed like this:
go install github.com/xyproto/orbiton/v2@latest && mv -i ~/go/bin/orbiton ~/go/bin/o