Vis editor – 80% of vim's features implemented in roughly 1% of the code
4 points · Open discussionmartanne
vis
C2014–2026
martanne / vis
vis
A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions
56Distinct people
92Mentions
4Explicit recommenders
5.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Regarding code elegance, OpenBSD[0] surely pride themselves in their code correctness and how they make it clean and understandable. Another example might be my favorite text…
Gualdrapo used a recommendation phrase. 4 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 8:03:49 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 year92 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-11-20 16:13:57 UTC to 2026-08-20 16:08:59 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 3 | 17 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 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 | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Vis - Combining Modal Editing with Structural Regular Expressions
Vis aims to be a modern, legacy-free, simple yet efficient editor,
combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam.
It extends vi's modal editing with built-in support for multiple
cursors/selections and combines it with sam's
structural regular expression
based command language.
A universal editor, it has decent Unicode support and should cope with arbitrary
files, including large, binary or single-line ones.
Efficient syntax highlighting is provided using
Parsing Expression Grammars,
which can be conveniently expressed using Lua
in the form of LPeg.
The editor core is written in a reasonable amount of clean (your mileage
may vary), modern and legacy-free C code, enabling it to run in
resource-constrained environments. The implementation should be easy to hack on
and encourages experimentation. There is also a Lua API for in-process
extensions.
Vis strives to be simple and focuses on its core task: efficient text
management. Clipboard and digraph handling as well as a fuzzy file open
dialog are all provided by independent utilities. There exist plans to use
a client/server architecture, delegating window management to your windowing
system or favorite terminal multiplexer.
The intention is not to be bug-for-bug compatible with vi(m). Instead,
we aim to provide more powerful editing features based on an elegant design
and clean implementation.
Build instructions
In order to build vis you will need a
C99
compiler, a POSIX.1-2008
compatible environment as well as:
curses (recommended)
Lua >= 5.2 (optional)
LPeg >= 0.12
(optional runtime dependency required for syntax highlighting)
TRE (optional for more memory efficient regex search)
Assuming these dependencies are met, execute:
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install
By default the configure script will try to auto detect support for
Lua using pkg-config(1). See configure --help for a list of supported
options. You can also manually tweak the generated config.mk file.
Or simply use one of the
distribution provided packages.
Documentation
End user documentation can be found in the
vis(1) manual page
and the Wiki. Read the
FAQ for common questions.
Learn about some differences compared to
sam(1) and
vim(1),
respectively.
C API as well as Lua API
documentation is also available.
Non Goals
Some features which will not be implemented:
tabs / multiple workspaces / advanced window management
file and directory browser
support for file archives (tar, zip, ...)
support for network protocols (ftp, http, ssh ...)
encryption
compression
GUIs (neither x11, motif, gtk, win32 ...) although the codebase
should make it easy to add them
VimL
right-to-left text
ex mode, we have more elegant structural regexp
diff mode
vimgrep
internal spell checker
lots of compile time configurable features / #ifdef mess
How to help?
There are plenty of ways to contribute, below are a few ideas:
Artwork
Color Themes
Homepage?
Documentation
Manual Pages
Improve :help output
Lua
API Documentation
and Examples
Unit Tests
Plugin Development
API Design
Testing Infrastructure
Distribution Packaging
Core Editor Design
Checkout the Developer Overview
to get started and do not hesitate to ask question in the #vis-editor
IRC channel on libera (join via your browser).
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
9 sourcesI too find kakoune interesting and have recently begun to add multiple cursor/selection support to my vim like editor.
https://github.com/martanne/vis
In Vim: Takeaways from One Year of TypingI had the chance to take a Oberon related lecture and its simplicity is really nice. Some things found in Oberon, like tiling window management, I use everyday. The book describes the whole system including the RISC CPU design.
As part of the Niklaus Wirth Birthday Symposium to celebrate his 80th birthday he also gave a talk titled "Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago" (Abstract[0], Slides[1], Video[2]).
There was also a demonstration on the original hardware, the system really seemed ahead of its time.
Project Oberon also inspired me to write a text editor[3] using a piece table data structure as described in Chapter 5.
[0] http://wirth-symposium.ethz.ch/speakers.html#Wirth
[1] http://wirth-symposium.ethz.ch/slides/wirth.pdf
[2] http://www.multimedia.ethz.ch/conferences/2014/wirth/?doi=10...
[3] https://github.com/martanne/vis#why
Read the rest
A piece table[0] solves this rather elegantly. Since it is a persistent data structure, a mark can be represented as a pointer into an underlying buffer. If the corresponding text is deleted, marks are updated automatically, since the pointer is no longer reachable from the piece chain. Lookup is linear[1] (or logarithmic if you store pieces in a balanced search tree) in the number of pieces i.e. non-consecutive editing operations.
[0] https://github.com/martanne/vis#text-management-using-a-piec...
[1] https://github.com/martanne/vis/blob/master/text.c#L1152
In Optimizing an Important Atom PrimitiveSince I've recently implemented a text editor based on a piece table myself, I spent some time researching where the concept was first used.
One of the first references (1974) I found was to the Bravo text editor for the Alto from Xerox PARC.
"Alto User’s Handbook"
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/15a-A...
Then in 1985 a text editor called Lara by J. Gutknecht who in the following years joined Wirth to build Project Oberon whose text management system is also based on a piece table.
"Concepts of the text editor Lara"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98....
If somebody as other, in particular earlier references, that would be interesting.
My recent implementation:
https://github.com/martanne/vis/blob/master/text.c
In Data Structures for Text Sequences (1998) [pdf]I admire Fabrice Bellard. I find amazing the amount of software that he has produced. Some of his creations are remarkable being one-man efforts eg. a compiler, an emacs clone, an emulator, etc.
I spent quite some months learning about editors and one of my evening distractions was to write a new UI backend for qemacs.
I found the design clever, quite flexible, etc, but in no-way easy to read or elegant.
(To be fair, it did not help that he added a video player and a WYSIWYG html editor to it).
Later I came to a Vim clone called vis (https://github.com/martanne/vis) and I found the source code more close to those programs where you think "It can't be made simpler".
I wish future programmers read more code before writing just like literature writers do. It should be part of the education system and I regret not having read "classics" befor
Read the rest
e starting writing.
No. They are not the same and shouldn't be. Rather they should communicate with each other. That is vim shouldn't have its own window functionality but instead detect that it runs within a terminal multiplexer and instruct it to create a new window. When I find the time I will try to experiment with this design in vis.
https://github.com/martanne/vis
As for the copy mode, in my opinion the multiplexer should use the editor as a filter (which requires that the editor uses stderr for its regular output). The whole scroll back buffer is piped to the editor and whatever the editor writes to stdout is kept around in a copy buffer.
That is the way it is implemented in the latest dvtm releases.
http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/
In Neovim now has builtin terminal emulation via libvtermI would imagine you can submit a PR at https://github.com/martanne/vis/pulls. He says "As always, comments and patches welcome!" in the README.
Edit: Maybe not, the mailing list mail says "git clone git://repo.or.cz/vis.git" instead. I'm not sure where the canonical source lives.
In Design of a Vim-like text editorIt actually is on GitHub[0]. I'm not sure why it wasn't mentioned in the mailing list.
[0]: https://github.com/martanne/vis
In Design of a Vim-like text editor