ctrlvim / cvi

ctrlvim is a modern text editor built from scratch in Rust, designed as a faithful reimplementation of Neovim's editing model. cvi is its terminal UI, built with Ratatui.

If you love Vim, but have ever wished for an editor that could be extended with Rust as easily as Lua, this is for you.

Why?

Neovim is incredible — but its C codebase is a mountain of complexity. ctrlvim reimagines the core from the ground up in memory-safe Rust, preserving what makes Vim great (modal editing, extensibility, terminal-native feel) while making the internals approachable and hackable.

Features

• Modal editing that just works — Normal, Insert, Visual, and Command-line modes with motions (w, b, e, {, }), operators (d, y, c), and text objects (iw, a", i()
• Lua plugins — Full vim.api.*, vim.fn.*, vim.keymap, and vim.treesitter compatibility via mlua
• Tree-sitter — Syntax-aware parsing and code navigation built in, driving live syntax highlighting in the editor (Rust and JSON so far)
• Undo tree — Branch-aware undo/redo (g- / g+) that doesn't lose history
• Registers — Yank ring, named registers, clipboard integration
• Window management — Splits with <C-w> commands, just like Vim
• Async I/O — Tokio-powered event loop for timers, and job control that streams a spawned program's output into the editor without blocking it
• Quickfix list — :vimgrep, :make, and :grep fill a navigable list (:copen, :cnext) that jumps straight to the file and line
• Folds — zf/za/zR/zM and foldmethod=indent, with fold-aware movement and scrolling
• Tags — Ctrl-] / Ctrl-T and the :tag family over a ctags -R . table
• TUI interface — Dashboard, file browser, plugin manager, and floating overlays
• Nerd Font file icons — Per-filetype glyphs in the dashboard and file explorer, falling back to the lettered chip when no Nerd Font is installed

Quick start

cargo run -p ctrlvim           # launch the editor
cargo run -p ctrlvim-core      # headless demo (no UI)
cargo test --workspace         # run all tests

Architecture

The project is organized into focused crates, each handling one concern:

Crate	Purpose
ctrlvim-text	Rope-backed buffers, marks, undo tree, registers
ctrlvim-editor	Motions, operators, text objects, window splits
ctrlvim-lua	Lua embedding and vim.* API compatibility
ctrlvim-api	#[ctrlvim_api] dispatch generation
ctrlvim-treesitter	Tree-sitter integration + the highlights.scm → styled-span highlighter
ctrlvim-async	Tokio event loop and msgpack-RPC
ctrlvim-vimscript	Vimscript interpreter
ctrlvim-tui	Terminal UI (Ratatui + crossterm)

License

Apache-2.0