cli | ||
debian | ||
edit | ||
gui | ||
read | ||
shared | ||
LICENSE | ||
makefile | ||
README.md |
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.
Most text editors function by:
- (1) loading the entire contents of a file into RAM,
- (2) making changes to that portion of RAM,
- and then (3) writing that portion of RAM back to the disk.
There's nothing wrong with this method -- but it does limit you to how much you can load into RAM at any one time. Try editing a 100GB file in a normal text editor!
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. Releases will be provided for amd64, i386, and arm64 architectures.
polonius-reader:
polonius-editor:
CLI (polonius):
GUI (polonius-gui):