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Kilo is a minimalistic terminal text editor written in C, famous for fitting its full implementation into fewer than 1,000 lines of code in a single source file. It was created by Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez, also known for Redis) as an exercise in writing a small, self-contained editor that others can study and extend. Despite its tiny size, Kilo supports core editor features like opening and saving files, incremental search, and basic syntax highlighting. It deliberately avoids external dependencies, not even using curses; instead it talks directly to the terminal using VT100 escape sequences, making it portable to most Unix-like systems with a compatible terminal. Because the codebase is compact and well-structured, it has become a popular teaching and learning resource, inspiring tutorials such as “Build Your Own Text Editor” that walk through implementing Kilo step by step.
Features
- Tiny C codebase in a single file with fewer than 1,000 lines of code
- Basic text editing with open, edit, and save operations from the terminal
- Incremental search with keyboard navigation across matches in the file
- Simple syntax highlighting support for demonstrating editor features
- Direct VT100 terminal control without external libraries like curses
- BSD 2 Clause licensed reference implementation ideal for learning and forks
Project Samples
