Very Little Editor

The Very Little Editor, or VLE, is a small text editor with just enough features to do some actual work.

Modern full-featured text editors can be a little daunting, complete with dozens upon dozens of different commands to remember and modes to switch between. It's a lot of power, but that power comes with the cognative load of having to remember which key combination to use or what mode the editor is in at any given time.

Let's try a different approach and see just how few features we need. By restricting our feature set to less than twenty powerful features, we can devote more mental effort to our projects and less mental effort to our tools.

Installation

Installing VLE from source can be done using Cargo:

cargo install vle

VLE compiles to a single self-contained binary which contains everything. Its syntax highlighting for different languages are built-in and it uses no configuration file; its minimal configuration options are done via simple environment variables.

Keybindings and Features

Because we have so few features, non-navigational features have alternative Ctrl-based and F-based keybindings. This also helps maintain compatibility with terminal multiplexers which have many of their own dedicated Ctrl bindings.

Open File

Files to open can be provided on the command line, or via the open files dialog. A filename can be provided if one needs to open a new file. One can select a file by navigating the filesystem interactively. Or one can tag multiple files and open several of them simultaneously.

Save File

Writes any changes back to the file on disk. Will report an I/O errors during writing, and will prompt to overwrite a file should it be changed out from under us.

Highlight Text and Cut / Copy / Paste

Highlighted text will be overwritten by the next keystroke, or can be cut / copied to the cut buffer where it can be pasted somewhere else.

Undo and Redo

VLE features a limitless undo stack, which can back up to the state of the file when first opened if necessary. Or, if one undoes a little too much, a redo stack to redo those changes is also provided.

Goto Line

Prompts one for a line number to jump to and navigates to that position in the file. Can also navigate directly to the first and last lines of the file without having to type in their respective line numbers.

Find Text

Prompts for text to search for and highlights all possible matches. Use arrow keys to cycle forward or backward through all possible matches in the file. The Del key can be used to cull matches from the match list.

Replace Text

Must be initiated during the "Find Text" process (we first find the text, then replace that text). Removes all matches from the text and prompts one for new text which is inserted interactively at all matches simultaneously. Feel free to use arrow keys to cycle between matches during the replacement process.

Goto Matching Pair

When the cursor is positioned at some directional paired character (such as (, [, {, <), this will jump forward or backward to its paired counterpart (), ], }, >).

Select Inside Pair

When the cursor is positioned between two paired characters, this will select all the text between them. Executing the command again will widen the selection to include the paired characters themselves. And executing the command yet again will widen the selection steadily outward to the next set of paired characters.

If it can't determine which pair of characters you mean automatically, it will prompt for which set to use.

Widen Selection to Whole Lines

If the start and end points of the selection are not at the start and end of a line, this widens the selection until it is.

Split Pane

Divides a single large window into two separate panes, either horizontally or vertically. Each pane may contain a different buffer, or different locations within the same buffer.

Reload File

Performs the inverse of a file save; updates our text to reflect the contents of the file on disk. Sometimes handy if some other tool modifies our file and we wish to continue working on it. Prompts whether to overwrite our buffer's contents if it has not yet been saved.

Quit Buffer

Closes the current file buffer, prompting for a confirmation if its contents have not yet been saved. The editor quits once all buffers have been closed.

Configuration

With very little to configure, VLE doesn't use a config file at all. Any configuration is performed with three environmental variables:

No config file means there's one less thing to install, learn the format of, modify or break.

Syntax Highlighting

VLE has syntax has built-in syntax highlighting for the following languages / file formats:

• Bourne Shell
• C
• C++
• CSS
• CSV
• Fish Shell
• Go
• HTML
• INI
• Java
• JavaScript
• JSON
• Makefile
• Markdown
• Patch
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Rust
• SQL
• Swift
• (La)TeX
• TOML
• XML
• YAML
• Zig

Syntax highlighting is done naively with an emphasis on colorizing known keywords, strings, etc.

Why Another Editor?

I've tried a lot of different text editors over the years, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. But I could never find the exact text editor I was looking for. Some were a little too overcomplicated. Some were a little too primitive. So rather than continue a seemingly endless search for the exact right text editor for me, I decided to write my own by mixing necessary features (like file saving) and those that impressed me in other editors (like splitting panes or selecting inside quotes).

Whether it's the editor for you depends on your needs and tastes. But VLE has been developed exclusively with itself since version 0.2, so I can confidently say that it's good enough for projects at least as large as itself.