Lynx

A lightweight terminal text editor written in Rust.

Lynx is a personal project built to learn Rust by implementing a text editor from scratch, inspired by editors such as Vim and Nano. It is currently in the early stages of development and is intended as a learning project rather than a fully featured editor.

Status: 🚧 Work in Progress

Why Lynx?

The primary goal of this project is to explore Rust through a real-world application. Instead of following small tutorials, I wanted to learn by building something practical and gradually adding features over time.

Current Features

• Terminal-based interface
• Keyboard input handling
• Basic text editing
• Written entirely in Rust
• Cross-platform terminal support using crossterm

Requirements

• Rust (stable)
• Cargo

Install Rust from:

https://rustup.rs

Running

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ReVuz/lynx.git
cd lynx

Run the editor:

cargo run

Building

cargo build

For an optimized release build:

cargo build --release

Project Structure

src/
├── editor.rs     # Editor implementation
└── main.rs       # Application entry point

Dependencies

• crossterm — cross-platform terminal manipulation

Roadmap

Some features I plan to implement while learning Rust include:

• Better cursor movement
• Opening and saving files
• Status bar
• Line numbers
• Search functionality
• Syntax highlighting
• Configuration support
• Undo/Redo
• Multiple buffers
• Improved performance

Contributing

This project is primarily a personal learning exercise, so I'm not accepting external contributions at the moment.

Feel free to open an issue if you discover a bug or have suggestions.

License

MIT License.

Acknowledgements

Inspired by terminal editors such as:

• Vim
• Nano
• Kilo (the small editor used in many text editor tutorials)

Author

Revathy M R

GitHub: https://github.com/ReVuz