Long Time, No Blog

- 4 mins read
kg welcome screen

Well, this has been quiet for a while. Not because I stopped tinkering — quite the opposite. Almost all of my time these days goes into Infix OS, a Linux-based network operating system by Wires. The OS is maintained under an independent organization, KernelKit, where I blog a lot — so check out the KernelKit blog.

But one stand-alone project of mine just hit a milestone I want to shout about, and it ties neatly into all that embedded work: kg, my tiny terminal text editor, just got its second big release, v1.1.0.

Just Enough Emacs

If you spend any time on serial consoles and freshly bootstrapped boards — like I do — you know the drill. vi is everywhere, but your fingers were trained on Emacs decades ago and refuse to learn new tricks. Full Emacs is rarely available (or wanted) on a 4 MB rootfs, and most of the “small Emacs” options still drag in dependencies.

kg scratches exactly that itch. It’s a small, fast editor with pure Emacs keybindings and — the whole point — proper UTF-8, built on top of antirez’ wonderful kilo: no curses, no libraries, just standard VT100 escape sequences.

Full disclosure: I also maintain an OpenBSD-derived mg fork, which already nails the dependency-free part nicely. So why start another editor? In a word: UTF-8. mg has never handled it, and bolting it on is a deep rabbit hole. The thread on issue #16 is worth a read: even Theo de Raadt — who once had a fully byte-clean mg fork and then lost the source — reckons that shoehorning UTF-8 in before mg is 8-bit clean is “a recipe for disaster,” since functions like search-and-replace are already a thicket of \n special cases. Coming at it from the other end — starting with antirez’ tiny, clean kilo and teaching it the Emacs keybindings and niceties my fingers expect — was simply easier, and a lot more fun, than retrofitting Unicode into mg.

The name is a nod to mg (MicroGnuEmacs): if mg is a microgram, kg is, well, a kilogram. Your fingers already know this one.

What’s New in v1.1.0

The first release covered the basics: multiple buffers, syntax highlighting, incremental search, multi-level undo, keyboard macros, and split windows — both stacked (C-x 2) and side-by-side (C-x 3), the latter something even my own mg fork still can’t do. This release is where it starts to feel like home:

  • Visual mark mode — after C-Space the region between point and mark is drawn in reverse video and tracks the cursor, transient-mark style. Shift-select and the CUA clipboard trio (Shift+Del, Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins) are wired up too, for fingers coming from a modern GUI.
  • Ido-style picker for M-x, C-x C-f, and C-x b — type any fragment of a name to narrow the list, backspace to climb a directory.
  • Rectangle mode — C-x SPC plus the usual C-x r k/y/d/c for column-wise cut, yank, delete, and clear.
  • External commands — M-! runs a shell command and inserts its output, M-| pipes the region through a filter (sort, jq, fmt, …).
  • C-u universal argument, C-q quoted-insert, tab completion in the minibuffer, detection of external changes with optional auto-revert, and a handful more motion commands (M-< / M->, M-{ / M-}, M-m, sentence motion, …).

Plus the usual round of bug fixes — including a fun one where opening the project’s own TODO.md would crash the Markdown highlighter on an unmatched **. The full list is in the changelog.

Forgot a Binding?

You don’t have to keep the whole keymap in your head. C-h brings up a built-in cheat sheet covering every binding:

C-h — the built-in key binding reference

C-h — the built-in key binding reference

Grab It

Building is the boring kind of boring:

git clone https://github.com/troglobit/kg.git
cd kg
make
sudo make install

Sources, releases, and the man page are all on GitHub. Bug reports and patches welcome, as always.