Are you tired of using actual editors, but nano is still too feature-rich and stable for you?

Introducing deci, your second-to-last next editor

I’m making this because I want to learn the Go lang. I’ve heard that Bubble Tea is the best of the best for making TUIs, but I’ve never used it because it requires using Go. Since I want to learn Go anyways, I figured that I’d give Bubble Tea a shot. I was trying to think of what kind of TUI to make, and a nano/vim/helix style text editor was the first thing that sprang to my mind.

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Obviously, my editor won’t have as many features as even nano (which is quite a low bar). I intend to have text rendering, file reading and writing, character insertion and deletion, an undo buffer, and maybe some other stuff.

Don’t hold me to this, but I might even implement markdown previewing via wrapping the Glamour utility.

The goal that I’m setting for myself is to write my final devlog for deci using deci itself.

Anyways, the name deci comes from the Metric prefix Deci, meaning 10^-1. nano comes from Nano, meaning 10^-9. It’s a bit of wordplay:

• The Deci prefix is far larger than Nano, and I expect that the deci binary will be much heavier than the nano binary because it has to bundle the Go runtime which is like 3-10 MB.
• Deci is not a very commonly used prefix. There’s basically nothing that uses Deci other than decibels and deciliters, and the “deci” in both of those terms is easy to miss (did you know that decibels are based on Bels? Also, the wikipedia page for Bel redirects to decibel). Nano, on the other hand is extremely common; everybody knows about nanobots and that “nano” means “very small”. Likewise, nobody except you, me, and a handful of other people know about deci editor, but tons of people know about nano.

Anyways, all that I’ve done so far is come up with a plan, write the stub README, and make the terrible banner that you see below.

Next, I’m going to install Go and start reading the Bubble Tea docs.