ked

ked is a text editor. It is purpose-built for myself as a code editor for use within a terminal multiplexer.

disclaimer

ked is unsupported software and I advise against using it for real. There are probably a lot of edgecases I have yet to find. You may encounter bugs, which will cause ked to crash, which will cause you to lose your buffer modifications irrevocably. I may make minor bug fixes, modifications, and improvements, but ked will never be much more than it is now. Presently it works well enough that after bootstrapping the project with another editor, ked itself has mostly been with developed with ked using macOS and GNU/Linux.

shortcuts

Presently the only way to change keyboard shortcuts is by editing the code. As ked is built with Go without many dependencies, recompiling is trivial.

The hardcoded keyboard shortcuts are the following:

• Ctrl+X exits the editor
• Ctrl+C cancel dialogs
• Ctrl+W saves the buffer
• Ctrl+S searches the buffer (use Ctrl+S to jump through results)
• Alt+Left and Alt+Right jump over wordish things
• Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E move cursor to beginning and end of present line
• Ctrl+G jumps to a specific line
• PageUp and PageDown move, well, a single page up or down
• Ctrl+K deletes from cursor to the end of line; also deletes empty lines
• Alt+Backspace deletes current word
• Ctrl+_ undos recent actions
• Tab inserts one tab character to cursor position
• Shift+Tab (Backtab) removes one level of tabulation from line beginning
• Alt+Up and Alt+Down jump to the previous or next empty line
• Ctrl+P displays the buffer selection dialog
• Ctrl+F displays the file-open dialog
• Alt+F closes the current buffer

Depending on your terminal settings, Alt may be mapped to Esc.

buffer management

We have a very minimalistic approach to buffer handling. You can open new buffers, close them, save their contents to a file, and change between them. A single buffer always occupies the available screen space. I use it within tmux, and if I need to see more than a single buffer at a time, I will open several panes for that purpose.

Opening files into new buffers is based on the idea of first selecting a root directory and then fuzzily finding filenames matching your filter. By default, we ignore certain directories like .git and node_modules. You may specify these exactly with the -ignoredirs argument or ignoredir option in the configuration file.

save hooks

Save hooks are command-lines, which are automatically executed after a glob-matching buffer is saved to a file. To make the mechanism more useful, all references to __ABSPATH__ in the command-line will be replaced with the current buffer's absolute path. If the command returns successfully, ked will reload the buffer's contents from the file.

Note that the mechanism is fairly limited: We generate the savehook command by splitting the command-line with spaces. The result is also not shell-expanded. For more complex invocations, use a wrapper script such as $HOME/bin/wrapper.sh __ABSPATH__.

configuring with a file

ked is mostly configured with a configuration file. See ked -h for the filepaths it looks from. Command-line argument -config may also be used to override the default filepaths.

An example configuration file is below. Note that we assume the relevant programs used in save hooks are found via $PATH.

tabsize=4
tabspaces=false
ignoredir=.git
ignoredir=node_modules
ignoredir=__pycache__
ignoredir=site-packages
maxfiles=50000
worddelims = " \t=&|,./(){}[]#+*%'-:?!'\""
warnfilesize=1048576

[filetype:*.c]
savehook=clang-format -i __ABSPATH__
tabsize=8

[filetype:*.go]
savehook=goimports -w __ABSPATH__
tabsize=4
tabspaces=true
highlight-keyword=bold:type
highlight-keyword=bold:func
highlight-keyword=bold:struct
highlight-keyword=bold:bold
highlight-keyword=underline:return
; highlight string literals
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:"(\\.|[^"\\])*"
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:'(\\.|[^'\\])*'
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:`(\\.|[^`\\])*`
; highlight single-line comments
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim://.*
; highlight function calls
highlight-pattern=254:2:3:bold:([-_\w]+)\(

[filetype:*.md]
savehook=pandoc --sandbox --atx-headers -f markdown -t markdown -o __ABSPATH__ __ABSPATH__
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:bold:#.+
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:`(\\.|[^`\\])*`

[filetype:*.py]
savehook=black __ABSPATH__
highlight-keyword=bold:def
highlight-keyword=bold:class
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:#.+
highlight-pattern=254:2:3:bold:([-_\w]+)\(
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:"(\\.|[^"\\])*"
highlight-pattern=255:0:1:dim:'(\\.|[^'\\])*'

[filetype:Makefile*]
tabsize=8
tabspaces=false