hedit

⚠️ Very early days. hedit is a work-in-progress terminal text editor written in hica. Almost nothing works yet — this repo currently exists to shape the design and to serve as an end-to-end integration workload for the hica compiler.

hedit is a lightweight, terminal-based text editor inspired by micro. It aims to pair modern editor UX (standard keybindings, mouse, multiple cursors, split views) with hica's algebraic effects and Perceus-based memory management (FBIP).

See docs/hedit-design.md for the full design document.

Configuration & plugins: HiLisp

hedit uses HiLisp — a small Lisp interpreter written in hica — as its configuration and plugin language. There is no second scripting runtime planned: settings, keybindings, and (later) plugins are all authored as .hl files evaluated by the same embedded HiLisp interpreter.

HiLisp lives as a git submodule under lib/hilisp/ and is compiled together with hedit (see hica.hml).

Example init.hl (v1 target)

;; ~/.config/hedit/init.hl

(set "tabsize"     4)
(set "auto-indent" true)
(set "theme"       "gruvbox")

(bind "Ctrl-s" 'save)
(bind "Ctrl-q" 'quit)
(bind "Ctrl-w" 'close-buffer)

Config discovery order (first hit wins):

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hedit/init.hl (or $HOME/.config/hedit/init.hl)
2. $HOME/.hedit.hl

If neither exists, hedit runs with hard-coded defaults.

v1 API surface

Built-in	Purpose
(set key value)	Set a configuration value
(get key)	Read a configuration value
(bind keystroke action)	Map a keystroke to a named built-in action

Everything else — plugin discovery, event hooks (on 'buffer-open, on 'save, …), buffer introspection/mutation (current-buffer, insert-text, …), a runtime :eval command — is planned for v2+ and will also be written in HiLisp, as additional built-ins on the same interpreter.

Cloning

Because HiLisp is a submodule:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/cladam/hedit.git
# or, if already cloned:
git submodule update --init --recursive

To bump the pinned HiLisp version:

git submodule update --remote lib/hilisp

Usage

hica build   # compile to binary
hica run     # compile and run
hica fmt     # format according to hica style guide
hica check   # type-check without emitting
hica clean   # remove generated files

Status

• ✅ Design document drafted (docs/hedit-design.md)
• ✅ HiLisp submodule wired into the build
• 🚧 Scripting bridge (src/script/hilisp_host.hc) — in progress
• 🚧 Core editor / event loop / effects — M3 green: src/runtime.hc now declares two pub effects — Terminal (poll/render/dimensions/cursor-style) and Clipboard (get/set selection) — and event_loop dispatches Save via built-in write_file, Copy/Paste through the Clipboard effect. All keybindings still flow through the config-driven Action pipeline (Ctrl-c → Copy, Ctrl-v → Paste added to default_bindings() — micro-style, HiLisp-remappable in M4). src/main.hc stacks an in-memory Clipboard handler outside the Terminal stub. 40/40 tests green: 19 actions (6 new Copy/Paste unit tests), 9 HiLisp host, 4 render, 8 runtime (3 new nested-handler integration tests for Ctrl-c/Ctrl-v / round-trip). Requires hica ≥ 0.49.4 for the test-mode panic-handler fix (see docs/hica-issues.md Issue #5). Real ANSI positioning + real OS clipboard land in a later pass.
• ⏳ Native terminal handler — not yet started

License

MIT — see LICENSE.