A Scheme/Lisp and s-expression code editor component, built in Zig. It is a standalone editor app, but is also designed to be embedded inside applications such as game engines and tools that already have a dvui window.

Status: pre-1.0, and used day-to-day for its own development — any file type, not only Scheme. What is still in progress is the engine side: hot-reload into a host VM and inline value inspection. See DESIGN.md for the full feature map and current phase.

Highlights

• Modal editing in the Helix/Kakoune lineage — normal mode for movement and selection, insert mode for typing.
• Cross-file code intelligence over a tree-sitter symbol index: g d jumps to a definition, g r lists where a symbol is used, space k shows its documentation, space s finds any definition in the project, and the completion popup ranks candidates from the same index with their signatures and docstrings. The index covers your code, Zig's standard library, and every dependency build.zig.zon declares — no configuration — and it persists between sessions.
• Tree-sitter–driven syntax highlighting + AST-aware indent. Scheme and Markdown are built in; Zig, JSON and Python install at runtime from a signed catalogue (:packages), which also upgrades and removes them.
• Scheme-aware paredit basics (auto-pair, skip-close, strict delete) and structural navigation
• Pickers for everything, all fuzzy-matched with previews: files, buffers, recent files, outline, project symbols, themes, packages, and a live workspace grep whose results re-search as you type
• Git-aware gutter: added/modified/removed bars, live against HEAD
• Scheme-defined keybindings, themes, and command-palette commands (src/keybindings.scm, src/themes.scm, src/commands.scm), layered with a user init.scm
• Multi-cursor editing, split views, jumplist, dot-repeat, selection undo/redo, count-prefixed motions
• Evaluate Scheme from the buffer into a *repl* transcript (space e for the form at the cursor, space E for the selection)
• macOS app bundle (zig build bundle), a quote CLI that opens files in the running app, quote -w for use as $EDITOR, and in-place self-update (:upgrade)

Build

Requires Zig 0.16.0 or newer. Earlier toolchains will fail at manifest validation.

main is self-contained: every dependency is pinned by url+hash, so a plain clone builds with no sibling checkouts. (The dev branch instead uses ../sibling path dependencies for fast local iteration — as a consumer you want main.)

zig build               # debug build → zig-out/bin/quote
zig build run           # build + run
zig build test          # full test suite (~80 s warm; fuzz + perf canaries)
zig build bundle -Doptimize=ReleaseFast        # macOS Quote.app
zig build install-user -Doptimize=ReleaseFast  # bundle + install to ~/Applications & ~/.local/bin/quote

After install-user, Quote.app is in ~/Applications (clickable from Finder) and quote is on $PATH — quote path/to/file.md opens the file in the running Quote.app (or starts it). No sudo, no system-wide writes. If ~/.local/bin isn't on your $PATH, the install step prints the line to add to your shell rc.

build.zig.zon pins every dependency to an exact commit; .tools/devkit/devkit pin-deps (run on main) bumps the pins to the sibling repos' pushed heads.

Cutting a release — versioning, signing, publishing — is written up in RELEASING.md.

Dependencies

Zig package manager pulls these via build.zig.zon:

• storykit — text editing core (gap buffer, styling, layout, undo)
• dvui — immediate-mode GUI (our fork of david-vanderson/dvui tracking the Zig 0.16 work)
• dvui-sokol — sokol backend for dvui (windowing, Metal, clipboard, native dialogs, std.Io runtime)
• sokol-zig — sokol bindings fork (carries an NSTextInputClient patch for dead-key composition)
• sokey — keyboard-layout-aware key translation
• sift + sift-matcher — threaded fuzzy-match engine + fzf-style matcher (file/buffer pickers)
• zpicker — headless picker state (query, selection, scroll)
• comb — content-search engine (regex/literal over a gitignore-aware walk) behind the live grep
• bearing — tags-based symbol index and resolver over tree-sitter: the definitions, use sites and ranked candidates behind g d, g r, space k and completion
• plumbuz — in-Zig git library (HEAD blobs + line diff for the gutter, gitignore for the walks)
• lamp — Scheme VM for REPL/completion/integration tests
• inputmap — modal input mapping
• zentry — file watching
• tree-sitter, with tree-sitter-scheme and tree-sitter-markdown vendored in vendor/ and compiled in. tree-sitter-zig and tree-sitter-json are fetched for the test suite but not bundled — the app installs those grammars, and Python, from the signed catalogue at runtime.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.