I had fun re-implementing antirez's "kilo" editor
https://github.com/antirez/kilo
There's a nice tutorial for it
https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
Great way to learn more about terminal modes and write some raw C
In Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving itantirez
kilo
C2016–2026
antirez / kilo
kilo
A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search.
29Distinct people
32Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year32 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-07-10 23:00:50 UTC to 2026-03-11 19:08:57 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Kilo
Kilo is a small text editor in less than 1K lines of code (counted with cloc).
A screencast is available here: https://asciinema.org/a/90r2i9bq8po03nazhqtsifksb
Usage: kilo <filename>
Keys:
CTRL-S: Save
CTRL-Q: Quit
CTRL-F: Find string in file (ESC to exit search, arrows to navigate)
Kilo does not depend on any library (not even curses). It uses fairly standard
VT100 (and similar terminals) escape sequences. The project is in alpha
stage and was written in just a few hours taking code from my other two
projects, load81 and linenoise.
People are encouraged to use it as a starting point to write other editors
or command line interfaces that are more advanced than the usual REPL
style CLI.
Kilo was written by Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez and is released
under the BSD 2 clause license.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
32 sourcesI've been learning systems programming for a while and recently I discovered kilo[0], which inspired me to start building my own editor[1]. Not sure how far I'll go, but hopefully it will be usable -- how fun would it be to build another project of mine using my own editor?
[O] https://github.com/antirez/kilo
[1] https://github.com/bloomca/love
In Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)VS Code used 40-60 bytes per line, so a file with 15 million single character lines balloons from 30 MB to 600+ MB. kilo uses 48 bytes per line on my 64-bit machine (though you can make it 40 if you move the last int with the other 3 ints instead of wasting space on padding for memory alignment), so it would have the same issue.
https://github.com/antirez/kilo/blob/323d93b29bd89a2cb446de9...
In Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search> It also inspired this similar Rust project
And these projects:
https://github.com/antirez/kilo/forks
In Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and searchKilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search
222 points · Open discussionOr kilo[1]
[0]: https://github.com/antirez/kilo/
In Edit is now open sourceA text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search
3 points · Open discussionMost of that is probably attributable to being based on Kilo: https://github.com/antirez/kilo - a tiny text editor written by antirez who notably also created Redis. Antirez has a bunch of really interesting side projects if you dig into their github repo.
In Ptext: A Nano-like text editor built with pure CYeah, "micro" for an editor would be 11 kilo bytes. I bet it's possible to do a half-decent editor in C in 11KB. Antirez's "kilo" (~1000 lines of C) is 36KB when compiled with standard gcc (https://github.com/antirez/kilo).
That said, for many server-type use cases these days, 11MB isn't a huge deal. Still, I wonder if micro could be compiled on / ported to TinyGo and end up a few hundred KB? It looks like TinyGo can produce some pretty small binaries: https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/optimizing-binaries/
In micro – A Modern Alternative to nano+1 for kilo. Another great approach is just to read the source code itself. It's only a thousand lines and it's well commented. https://github.com/antirez/kilo/blob/master/kilo.c
In Over the past 21 months I’ve written a code editor from the ground upAnyone interested in the machinations of all of this terminal stuff should look at antirez’ kilo, a terminal text editor in under 1000 lines of code: https://github.com/antirez/kilo
There is a nice tutorial that walks through how one might write it from scratch: https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
In What happens when you press a key in your terminal?You could start by looking at something super simple like Kilo:
https://github.com/antirez/kilo
Even I could understand this one pretty well and that's no small matter.
In Ask HN: How to learn about text editor architectures and implementations?I am just trying to learn myself so take this with a grain of salt but I have found the github of Antirez:(https://github.com/antirez) - the author of Redis - to be an amazing resource. The code is incredibly well documented and to my eyes pretty well written. A good place to start I think is Kilo:(https://github.com/antirez/kilo/blob/master/kilo.c) - a 1000 line text editor with no dependencies.
In Actually Portable ExecutablesYou might also be interested in kilo: https://github.com/antirez/kilo
In Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editorAsk HN: What small C projects would you recommend for beginners?
My friend is learning C (and some computer science), I've pointed him to "Learn C: Build Your Own Lisp" and some frequently shared online courses but I'd love to share a bunch of small (fun) C projects with him that do a good job at showcasing the language. For example Kilo from the creator of Redis https://github.com/antirez/kilo
3 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 32 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.