Xi-editor

Status update on the xi-editor

2022-12-09T15:37:03+00:00

The xi-editor project is currently discontinued. Although we’d like in principle to resume work on it one day, we recognize this is unlikely to occur in the coming years considering the other projects that occupy our time.

You may be interested in the Lapce editor, which can be considered a spiritual successor to the xi-editor.

1: The story so far

2019-02-06T20:26:00+00:00

Xi Day Episode 1: Where did the xi-editor project come from, and how did we make the decisions we’ve made so far?

Download an mp3 or search for “Xi Day” in your podcast player of choice.

Show Notes

Swift JSON performance discussion
Language Server Protocol
Salsa introduction
How Salsa Works (YT)
Data Laced With History (Causal Tree CRDTs)
xray cursor movement
Raph’s Localhost Talk
xi.zulipchat.com

The Xi Day Radio Show

2019-01-10T17:20:03+00:00

Episode 0: Piet, Kurbo, Druid, and Rust 2D graphics generally: aka “Raph, what have you been up to this past month?”.

Every few weeks, Raph and I have a catchup call, where we discuss various aspects of xi-editor and related projects. For 2019, we wanted to try something new; recording these conversations and publishing them for the enjoyment of people following along.

Earlier this week, we did our first test episode, which turned out well enough (some audio glitches and breathing noises aside) and so we’d like to share that with you now. Currently you can listen to the zeroeth episode directly, and we’ll be getting an RSS feed set up and submitted to Apple’s podcast directory soon, so you can listen in your podcast player of choice.

Show Notes

Announcing the xi-editor github organization

2018-10-01T21:01:03+00:00

I’m pleased to announce that xi-editor is now hosted in its own github organization, moved from being a Google project. The main practical upshot is that a Google Contributor License Agreement is no longer needed. It also signals the community-focused direction of the project.

I’ve already noticed increased activity from contributors since the change, and am happy to see that. I believe xi-editor is on the cusp of being a self-sustaining community-driven open source project; certainly it feels that way looking at the rate of code contributions.

Since my main focus these days is creating a music synthesis game, I’ll be up-front, I don’t have the bandwidth to do fine-grained code review of every PR, and to guide each detail of architectural decisions, along the lines of the rope science series. I plan on dedicating one day a week to such matters. Fortunately, I see a path to the project being successful in spite of my somewhat limited bandwidth. For a while, Colin Rofls has been doing the lion’s share of review, triage, and community interaction. I’m deeply grateful for his work. Also, I invite contributors to help share the load, reviewing each other’s code, discussing desired features and implementation strategies for them, and then assigning issues to me when they need my review. I’m hopeful this will grow a scalable and sustainable structure for the community. To this end the project also has a new set of contributor guidelines, which explain in more detail what our process will be going forward.

A major focus for xi has been research and learning. For the near and medium term, I think it will be a more appealing project for people interested in learning how text editors are made and getting deeper into Rust programming techniques, as opposed to a polished out-of-the-box editing experience. Some of the biggest challenges are in packaging – keeping the front-end, core, and suite of plugins coherent and updated. This is one reason why there are no prebuilts, etc., even though we’ve seen a fair amount of demand. To be honest, I don’t have a very clear vision how to solve those problems, and am hoping the community can come together around them. Even so, I plan on using xi-editor as much as possible as my daily driver.

Some will be curious about the state of the Fuchsia front-end. I still think it has quite a bit of promise, but it’s still early days for Fuchsia and the platform is not really ready for end-user software or self-hosted development. I’m hopeful it will get there in time and feel that xi-editor will be a great fit for it at that time. I look forward to continuing to collaborate with the Fuchsia team and others within Google.

I’d like to thank Google for supporting xi-editor, to their open source team for the administrative support, and of course to all the contributors over the 2.5 years so far.

It’s been quite a journey so far, and I’m excited for the future!

Originally published on raphlinus.github.io