Instant startup over SSH. No config files. Just works.

日本語

Emacs keybindings, mg-like lightness. For those who don't want to learn vim, but find nano lacking.

• You want comfortable editing over SSH without configuration
• Emacs keybindings are in your muscle memory
• You prefer composing with Unix tools (sort, jq, sed)
• You're tired of managing dotfiles

• You need IDE features like completion or LSP
• You want to customize everything
• You prefer vim's modal editing

• Under 500KB — No dependencies, single binary
• Zero-config — No dotfiles, just copy and use
• Emacs-style editing — Multi-buffer, window splitting, kill ring
• Shell integration — Pipe to sort, jq, awk directly
• Full UTF-8 support — Japanese, emoji, grapheme clusters

• Linux (x86_64, aarch64)
• macOS (Intel, Apple Silicon)
• WSL2

brew tap sanohiro/ze
brew install ze

Download from Releases and place in your PATH.

# Requires Zig 0.15+
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
cp ./zig-out/bin/ze ~/.local/bin/

ze file.txt          # Open a file
ze -R file.txt       # View file (read-only)
ze                    # Start with empty buffer

Save and quit: C-x C-s → C-x C-c

ze follows the Unix philosophy: "Text is a stream."

Advanced text processing is delegated to existing tools like sort, jq, awk, sed. ze acts as the pipeline connecting these tools to your buffer. No reinventing the wheel.

M-| executes shell commands, piping selection or buffer content.

[source] | command [destination]

| date +>              # Insert date at cursor
| sort >               # Sort selection and replace
% | jq . >             # Format entire JSON buffer
. | sh >               # Execute current line as shell
% | grep TODO n>       # Extract TODO lines to new buffer
| upper >              # Convert selection to uppercase (with alias)
| lower >              # Convert selection to lowercase (with alias)

C-g cancels at any time. Long-running processes (LLM calls, etc.) are fine.

Prefix history matching: Type part of a command, then press ↑/↓ to cycle through matching history only.

| git       # Press ↑
| git push origin main   # Only "git" commands shown
| git commit -m "fix"    # Press ↑ again

Tab completion: Press Tab to complete commands and file paths (uses bash's compgen).

| gi<Tab>        → git
| cat /tmp/<Tab> → shows files in /tmp/

Create ~/.ze/aliases to define shortcuts for common operations:

alias upper='tr a-z A-Z'
alias lower='tr A-Z a-z'
alias trim='sed "s/^[[:space:]]*//;s/[[:space:]]*$//"'
alias uniq='sort | uniq'

When this file exists and bash is available, ze automatically loads your aliases.

Not familiar with Unix text tools? Check out:

• awesome-text-tools — Curated list of text processing tools
• txtk — Simple text toolkit for common operations (includes Japanese text handling)

ze uses Emacs-style keybindings. C- means Ctrl, M- means Alt/Option.

Full keybindings: KEYBINDINGS.md

ze highlights comments only. This is intentional:

• Readability — Comments stand out in config files
• Not an IDE — Full syntax highlighting adds complexity without benefit for ze's use case
• Speed — Minimal parsing overhead

• Syntax highlighting — ze is for config files, not coding
• LSP — Use VSCode for serious development
• Plugins — Simplicity over extensibility
• Mouse / GUI — Keyboard and terminal only

• Text selection: Drag to select text with your terminal's native selection. Copies to system clipboard.
• Scrolling: Use C-v / M-v or PageDown / PageUp for scrolling (trackpad scrolling is disabled).

• Optimized for UTF-8 + LF. Zero-copy mmap for UTF-8+LF files.
• Auto-detects and converts: UTF-8 (with/without BOM), UTF-16 (with BOM), Shift_JIS, EUC-JP
• Auto-detects line endings (LF, CRLF, CR)
• Saves in original encoding (encoding, BOM, and line endings are preserved)

• Piece Table buffer with Undo/Redo
• Grapheme cluster support (emoji, CJK)
• Incremental search, regex, Query Replace
• Multi-buffer, window splitting
• Shell integration (M-|)
• Comment/indent settings for 48 languages
• Keyboard macros (C-x ( / ) / e)
• In-app help (M-?)

1. Speed — Responsiveness is our top priority.
2. Minimal — Do one thing well.
3. Unix — Text is a stream. Pipes are first-class.
4. Zero-config — Copy and run. (History stored in ~/.ze/)

• mg — Minimal Emacs
• kilo — 1000-line editor
• vis — Structural regex

MIT

"Do one thing well. Fast."