xi-tui is a terminal frontend for xi.

It is experimental and under development, so don't expect anything magical (yet!).

The frontend assumes that you have installed the core editor and is available in your PATH. The following should suffice:

git clone https://github.com/google/xi-editor
cd xi-editor/rust
cargo install

# if you want syntax highlighting, you need to install the syntect plugin:
cd syntect-plugin
make install

# You need to add ~/.cargo/bin to your PATH
# (this is where `cargo install` places binaries).
# In your .bashrc (or equivalent), add `export PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin`

Then you can clone this repository and run the frontend with cargo run --release -- <your_file>. your_file can be an existing file or any dummy name.

For debugging, it can be useful to have logs. You can specify a location for log files xi-tui with -l <logfile>. Two files will be written:

• <logfile>: all the xi-tui logs
• <logfile>.rpc: the RPC messages exchanged between the core and the frontend

For now, there are only two shortcuts:

• ^w saves the current view
• ^c exits

We assume tabs (\t) are 4 columns large. It that is not the case in your terminal, the cursor position will be inaccurate. On linux, to set the \t width to four spaces, do:

tabs -4

If you have the syntect plugin installed, colors will be enabled by default, with two caveats:

• you must have true colors enabled. Otherwise, some portions of text won't be displayed
• the default theme is for dark backgrounds