Overview

cilo is a text editor with syntax highlighting and search written in C99.

cilo is a minimal text editor, which implements a small feature set - while having zero third party dependencies. Designed to be simple, cilo, nonetheless, supports most common text editor operations.

Release Build

cilo is built using CMake and requires at least C99. clang-tidy and clang-format config files are also provided.

git clone https://github.com/buzzcut-s/cilo.git
cd cilo/
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
cmake --build .
cd src/

The binary is built in the cilo/build/src/ directory

Usage

cilo              # Start a new text buffer
cilo <file path>  # Open a file

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut	Description
Ctrl-F	Incremental search; use arrows to navigate
Ctrl-S	Save the buffer to the current file, or specify the file path
Ctrl-Q	Quit

Syntax Highlighting

• cilo has a very extensible system to add new syntax highlights for different file types. By default, cilo supports highlighting for the C language. See the editor/syntax module for more details.

Implementation Details

• cilo uses an in-memory array of lines which is created when loading new files, and flushed when saving files. This was the approach taken by the Visual Studio Code team until 2018 (See: here); if it was good enough for them - it is good enough for us. Specialized data structures such as gap buffers and piece tables were looked into, but due to the exponential increase in complexity when implementing them - a simple data layout was chosen as the default.
• Since cilo uses no third party dependencies (not even curses), we control the terminal using fairly standard (if sometimes less documented) VT100 (and similar) escape sequences.
• Uses portable C99, tested on both GCC and Clang, with no compiler specific extensions. We only support Linux.
• Supports file type detection to enable language specific highlights.
• Supports incremental search.

I am using cilo as my default git editor.

License

cilo is licensed under the MIT License, © 2022 Piyush Kumar. See LICENSE for more details.

cilo is inspired by kilo, another text editor written in C. kilo is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause License, © 2016 Salvatore Sanfilippo. See LICENSE for more details.