neo-ed

neo-ed is the new standard editor.

What?

If you feel like you are lacking some context, this might help.

Elevator Pitch

What if your editor was a command line shell?
What if it had a simple but powerful language to manipulate both small and huge amounts of text?
What if it integrated seamlessly with most OS commands?
What if your editor was scriptable?

This is ed.

What if ed was a lot more "user friendly"?
What if ed had modern features like syntax highlighting, line editing, command history, ... ?
What if ed was easily extensible through Lua plugins and scripting?

With neo-ed, the author firmly believes she has created one of the most powerful and flexible tools for working with any kind of line based data. She also thinks it makes for a pretty decent general purpose text editor =)

Building and Installing

For installation, the neo-ed source tree is bundled into a single executable script called ned. It is created by the build.sh script. It has no special dependencies, but can use git to derive a version number.

The bundle of the current main branch can be downloaded here.

Execution Requirements

Mandatory:

Lua 5.4
Lua posix library

Recommended:

Lua lrexlib-posix library for POSIX BRE matching (neo-ed can fall back to Lua patterns, which use a completely different syntax)
bat and/or pygments for syntax highlighting
editorconfig to configure neo-ed settings per file
fzf to replace the barebones built-in picker

Optional:

less for pagination of large text sections (e.g. diffs)
iconv for working with non-UTF-8 files
wl-clipboard or xclip for clipboard integration

Usage

neo-ed is mostly POSIX.1-2017 compatible. "Actually using ed" by Tom Ryder is a great introduction.

neo-ed has an internal help page system. The pages from the current main branch can be browsed online here.

neo-ed has a manager for external plugins. Its usage is documented in /doc/plugin_manager.md.