Absolute Simple Editor

A minimal, robust, blazingly fast, and aesthetically deliberate GUI text editor.

Install First five minutes Source

Core and GUI are cleanly separated — the editing engine is a headless C library (core/) with a stable C ABI, and the GUI (gui/) is a replaceable Qt6 shell on top of it. See ADR 0002 for why.

Where to start

• Guide

  Install it, configure it, rebind it, extend it. Start with your first five minutes.

• Reference

  Every command, every default binding, every config key — generated from the source, so they cannot drift from the binary.

• Decisions

  Every architecturally significant choice, in the order it was made, with the reasoning and what it cost.

• Roadmap

  What is done, phase by phase, and what is still open.

Status

v0.4.0-beta, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

All seven original spec phases, the "complete normal editor" pass, and a Vim mode well past its original scope — motions, operators with counts, text objects, marks, macros, named registers, . repeat, Visual and Replace modes, / search and :s, pinned by 218 conformance cases generated from real vim.

Tree-sitter highlighting for seven languages, an LSP client with diagnostics, completion, hover, go-to-definition, find-references and a document outline, three built-in palettes, keybindings as data, session restore, git gutter marks, and a save path that cannot lose the file it is writing.

Linux is the supported platform — see Which platforms. On Windows the language server and :compile are present and do nothing.

See the roadmap for what is still open, and Contributing for the ground rules.