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Cool! I wanted to do similar things, neat idea. These days i'm wanting to try something similar but with a nice UI - i'm so tired of the Terminal, but it's hard to get away because editors like Kakoune and Vim are just so powerful.

My wish is that you or I (if i ever have the time) will implement something like this onto XiEditor. Ie, implement this as a feature to a lower level editor backend, so that you get the frontends "for free".

It drives me nuts that there's so much work done for the frontend side of things, but the backend of editors are being reinvented repeatedly for little gain.

I hope Xi can make a performant, hackable backend to plug into solid frontends.




I doubt this will ever happen. It's all about complexity, and in case of text editors there are layers and layers of abstractions that often (for UX reasons) have to be integrated tightly. Trying to unpack all pieces into fully generic bring-your-own implementation is going to be a lot of work upfront and in maintenance, and complexity explosion.

I really like some technical aspects of Xi, but I view it as a typical wishlist project/technical showcase. In the meantime projects like kakoune, with much smaller scale but better focus, in shorter time, build ecosystems that can be a practical Vim alternative.


One of NeoVim’s goals was to also be a backend to multiple front ends. The eternal dream of having Vim on a <textarea> or when writing email.

I don’t know how far they’ve come as I switched back to Vim when version 8 came out.


There is a ticket about this that might interest you. It seems like there is work to do, but that it might get there

https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187




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