THIS REPO IS CURRENTLY A WORK-IN-PROGRESS. Polonius is not yet fully functional

polonius

A uniquely memory-efficient and modular text editor

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief.

– Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

About

Polonius is a text editor with a focus on memory efficiency.

Although Polonius can be used as a general-purpose text editor, it is primarily designed for editing very large files on systems with very little RAM.

Polonius can be used to edit files of any size (up to just over 8 million terabytes) on systems with as little as only a few kilobytes of available memory.

In order to achieve this, it never loads any more data into RAM than is currently being used. All that we have to keep in memory is the part of the file that's currently being displayed, plus a list of the changes the user wants to make.

Polonius is made up of separate binary modules:

• The "reader", which outputs a selected portion of the contents of a file
• The "editor", which interprets editing instructions (replace, insert, and remove) and makes the requested changes to the file
• And the interactive UI, which ties together the functionality of the other modules.

Development Progress

Development is done on Debian GNU/Linux. Builds are also tested on OpenBSD. Target systems for release versions will be: GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. I'm hoping to provide x86-64 as well as arm64 builds.

polonius-reader:

polonius-editor:

CLI (polonius):

GUI (polonius-gui):