sev is an Emacs-like, Vim-like extensible graphical text editor powered by:

• SDL3 for windowing, rendering and low level device I/O.
• Clay for layout and UI.
• Chibi Scheme as an embedded interpreted language, filling the same role as elisp in Emacs or Lua in Neovim.

This application is not an attempt to build a feature-complete clone of Emacs, but does aim to be:

• Genuinely usable.
• Lightweight / performant.
• Portable. More specifically, able to run on Windows, Mac, Linux and in the browser via Emscripten and WebAssembly.
• Highly configurable and extensible via Scheme.

The ultimate goal of sev is to bring together a core set of features from Emacs and Vim (and a couple from more modern editors like Helix and Zed), which can then serve as a foundation for non-text-editor applications where text editing needs to be a first-class application capability. This leads to a couple of points of departure from the Emacs philosophy:

1. Everything is not a buffer. Many things are buffers, but sev will also make use of other forms of graphical display. For example, I plan on using it to create a music composition environment with notation and all kinds of other non-text graphical elements.
2. sev does not try to be unopinionated. Defaults should be sane, and batteries should usually be included.

Emacs’s power comes from the homogeneity of its internals and the fact that everything is exposed via Lisp and available to customise. But the end user of Emacs is the person using it as a text editor, and they need to be able to change everything at runtime.

The end user of sev is the application developer, who has direct access to the C internals. Their end user is using whatever they build with it! Most things should still be customisable, but the application developer is the user sev will be specially oriented towards. Hopefully it will still be an excellent text editor by itself, and perfectly viable as a main driver.

A couple of features are also on the roadmap for sev beyond standard text editing capabilities:

• I’d like sev to support collaborative text editing sessions ASAP. Eg-walker is a fairly recent algorithm and looks very exciting.
• I’m keen to explore alternative ways of displaying text that make better use of modern monitors and typography.
• As an admirer of Obsidian, Emacs’s Org Mode and the original idea of hypermedia that gave us the World Wide Web, I’d like to build some wiki-like capabilities directly into the editor. Possibly via directives that are usable anywhere recognisable as inside a code comment in text buffers (or anywhere if the buffer holds non-code text like Markdown).

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