Introduction

nimped stands for (N)ew and (Imp)roved Text (Ed)itor. The reason for this, is that it is my second personal text editor, improving upon medioed, which I made public and posted about on social media over a year ago. If you are not familiar with medioed, read about it here, or see the Reddit post here.

How is it different from medioed?

There are two main differences - simplifications and redesigns. In terms of redesigns, the most significant is that it is now modal (albeit, with only two real modes implemented). As for simplifications, I realized that a lot of what I did with medioed was unnecessary and was a much worse idea than I initially thought.

For example, with medioed I thought that separating frames from buffers would somehow be useful, enabling editing multiple places in a buffer at the same time. I quickly realized that I never do this, and it doesn't really help my workflow at all, but the damage was already done; and instead of redoing that system from the ground up, I just implemented safeguards to stop the user from making use of the capability. With this new text editor, I drew upon about a year and a half of experience with medioed to avoid making these mistakes.

There is now also a way to modify user configurations for stylistic things like tab size and theme colors without having to recompile the program every single time, as a dynamically loaded config file system was implemented.

Installing nimped

Clone the repository from GitHub and cd into it:

$ git clone https://git.tirimid.net/nimped $ cd nimped

Then, build the nimped binary:

$ ./build.sh

After a successful build, install the binary to the system:

# ./install-bin.sh

You will also need the user config installed to your $HOME/.config directory in order to use nimped, so run:

$ ./install-conf.sh

(See the README.md file for information regarding installing themes and uninstalling nimped from your system).

Dynamically configuring nimped

The user configuration will be installed to $HOME/.config/nimped. Inside, you will find several conf files. Inspect these files for anything interesting; in particular, you will find the following options in layout.conf:

margin = 80 tab = 2

I point these out because these are probably the ones you'll most want to change.

Running nimped

After installing nimped, you can run it through the command line. The usage is as follows:

$ nimped [options] file1 file2 file3 ...

For specific usage information and help with command line flags, run:

$ nimped -h

Keybind cheatsheet

Base mode

h: Move left one character
l: Move right one character
j: Move down one line
k: Move up one line
a: Move to the start of the current line
e: Move to the end of the current line
f: Move forward one word
b: Move backward one word
C-x: Quit nimped
C-n: Create a new scratch frame
C-f: Create a frame from a file
C-k: Kill the current frame
C-s: Save the contents of the current frame to a file
n: Goto the next frame
p: Goto the previous frame
m: Set the current frame as master
u: Undo the last changes made to the frame
/: Search the frame forwards for literal text
?: Search the frame backwards for literal text
c: Copy the current line
d: Cut the current line
q c: Copy a given number of lines
q d: Cut a given number of lines
v: Paste the clipboard contents
z: Center the frame around the cursor
g: Goto a given line
F3: Start recording a macro
F4: Stop recording / execute a macro
i: Enter write mode

Write mode

C-x: Quit write mode
C-d: Delete the character in front of the cursor
BACKSPC: Delete the character behind the cursor (handling smart parens)
M-BACKSPC: Delete the word behind the cursor
RET: Insert a new line (handling indentation and smart parens)
(: Insert a smart left-paren
[: Insert a smart left-bracket
{: Insert a smart left-brace
": Insert a smart double-quote

Prompt mode

C-x: Quit prompt with failure
RET: Quit prompt with success
C-f: Move right one character
C-b: Move left one character
C-a: Move to the start of the prompt
C-e: Move to the end of the prompt
M-f: Move forward one word
M-b: Move backward one word
C-d: Delete the character in front of the cursor
BACKSPC: Delete the character behind the cursor (handling smart parens)
M-BACKSPC: Delete the word behind the cursor
(: Insert a smart left-paren
[: Insert a smart left-bracket
{: Insert a smart left-brace
": Insert a smart double-quote

This work by tirimid is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0