A community-driven port of mg to Rust.
Table of Contents
mg is intended to be a small, fast, and portable editor for people who can't (or don't want to) run Emacs for one reason or another, or are not familiar with the vi editor. It is compatible with Emacs because there shouldn't be any reason to learn more editor types than Emacs or vi.
Rust is a great alternative to C.
Rust has a fantastic learning curve. The documentation is superb, and the community is very helpful if you get stuck.
Rust has excellent tooling. The compiler makes great suggestions,
the unit test framework is good, and rustfmt helps ensure formatting
is beautiful and consistent.
The Rust packaging story is excellent. It's easy to reuse the great libraries available, and just as easy to factor out code for the benefit of others. We can replace entire C files in Emacs with well-maintained Rust libraries.
Code written in Rust easily interoperates with C. This means we can port to Rust incrementally, and having a working Emacs at each step of the process.
Rust provides many compile-time checks, making it much easier to write fast, correct code (even when using multithreading). This also makes it much easier for newcomers to contribute.
Give it a try. We think you'll like it.
OK, this is not really a fork. To be honest, this is not even a re-implementation of mg in Rust: it is just mg compiled with cargo and some Rust glue.
So what is this all about? Maybe I'm just mocking
REmacs or I'm playing with the
cc crate and Rust's ffi. You should stop reading here, it is just a
really bad joke.
But the code runs the latest mg from OpenBSD. Which is by far the best editor: small, fast, Emacs-like but without all the Emacs.
If you really want to contribute, go and get the mg sources from OpenBSD. You can always send mg patches to tech@openbsd.org.