Light Weight UTF-8 Terminal Text Editor

A spiritual descendant of mg (Micro Emacs) — same Emacs heritage, about half the lines of code. See mg's README for the wider Emacs-in-a-terminal family kg comes from.

kg is a small, fast terminal text editor with pure Emacs keybindings. Suitable for editing system files or quick fixes on remote systems where a full GUI editor is not available.

With syntax highlighting for many languages, multiple buffers, split windows, incremental search, and multi-level undo, kg punches above its weight while staying dependency-free — no curses, just standard VT100 escape sequences.

Features

• Pure Emacs-style keybindings
• Syntax highlighting for many programming languages, including hex/binary/octal integer literals
• Multiple buffers with shared kill ring
• Split-window support
• Visual mark mode: the region renders in reverse video as you move
• Shift-select and the CUA clipboard trio (Shift-Delete / Ctrl-Insert / Shift-Insert) alongside the Emacs C-w / M-w / C-y
• Rectangle commands (C-x SPC, C-x r {k,y,d,c})
• Incremental search and query-replace (M-%)
• Multi-level undo (C-_)
• Paragraph reflow to 72 columns (M-q)
• Keyboard macros (C-x ( / C-x ) / C-x e)
• M-x, C-x C-f, and C-x b all share an ido-style picker: substring matching, already-open files pushed to the back of the file picker
• Detects external changes to open files; optional auto-revert
• Shell commands (M-!) and pipe-region-through-command (M-|)
• Comment-dwim (M-;)
• Word-case bindings (M-u / M-l / M-c)
• Open line (C-o) and join-line (M-^)
• Quoted-insert (C-q) for literal Tab/Esc/control bytes
• Universal-argument (C-u) for repeated commands
• Auto-indent and bracket autocomplete
• Suspend to background (C-z)
• Built-in help in a scrollable help buffer (C-h)
• No dependencies (not even curses)
• Uses standard VT100 escape sequences
• Graceful terminal resize handling

Usage

kg [-RVh] [file ...]

Option	Description
-R	Open file(s) read-only
-V	Print version and exit
-h	Print this help and exit

Multiple files can be opened at once, each in its own buffer. See the man page for more in-depth information as well as the full key binding reference.

Building and Installing

make
sudo make install          # installs to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share/man/man1

Override the prefix or use DESTDIR for staged installs:

make install prefix=/usr
make install DESTDIR=/tmp/pkg

To uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

Origin & References

kg is based on kilo by Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), the original minimal text editor that demonstrates how to build a functional editor without dependencies in about 1000 lines of C code.

The name "kg" is a nod to mg (Micro Emacs), suggesting "kilo-gram" — a minimal implementation with Emacs keybindings. mg's README is the place to read up on the broader lineage if the heritage matters to you.