ad

ad :: an adaptable text editor

ad (pronounced A.D.) is an attempt at combining a modal editing interface of likes of vi and kakoune with the approach to extensibility of Plan9's Acme. Inside of ad text is something you can execute as well as edit.

:warning: In the spirit of Plan9 itself, ad is primarily intended as playground for experimenting with implementing various text editor features and currently is not recommended for use as your primary text editor.

That said, if this sounds like something you might find interesting then please do take a look and see what you think! For now there isn't a whole lot of user facing documentation other than the built in :help section, so you will need to read through the source code and GitHub issues to learn about what is and is not implemented.

:warning: Project Status

ad is now stable enough that you can try it out and see what you think. That said, there is currently very little documentation and there are likely to be a variety of bugs and crashes in places that I've not managed to fully track down yet. If you do try it out and spot something that is broken, please raise an issue on GitHub so I can look into it. The project is also under active development and while I aim to avoid arbitrary incompatible changes to the way the editor works, I am not yet fully committing to a stable keybindings or default behaviours. If you are using ad and you find that something is no longer working as expected following an update, please refer to the git log for details of what has changed.

You have been warned!

:technologist: Contributing

The project as a whole isn't particularly well suited for external contributors in its current state so please do raise an issue to discuss any proposed changes or feature requests first rather than directly opening PRs. Outside of minor bug fixes and typo corrections I am unlikely to be able to do anything other than close PRs that have been opened without prior discussion of the issue they are intending to address.

:eyes: Getting started

Packaging of the project to include the default config files and helper scripts isn't currently in place, so the recommended way to try out ad is to clone this repo and compile from source:

$ git clone git@github.com:sminez/ad.git
$ cd ad
$ cargo install --path .
$ cargo xtask setup-dotfiles

Please see here for the actions that are carried out by the setup-dotfiles task. You should review these and make sure that you are happy to proceed before running the task.

From there you should be able to open ad and run the :help command to view the built-in help. If you would like to watch a tour of how ad works there is one available here.

Please be aware that given the early stage of the project and frequent changes to the codebase, the exact content of the video tour may not accurately reflect the current state of ad.

:straightruler: The design of ad

ad is aiming to be a hybrid of the pieces of various editors that I find most useful:

• vim style modal editing
• convenient text navigation and selection from vim/kakoune
• mini-buffer based user defined minor modes from emacs
• sam/acme style editing commands for larger editing actions
• acme style extension through exposing editor state and functionality for