Cano (kay-no) is a VIM inspired modal-based text editor written in C using the ncurses library.

Icon made by LocalTexan

Cano has the following dependencies:

• GCC
• ncurses

1. Navigate to the Cano directory

cd path/to/cano

2. Bootstrap nobuild

cc nob.c -o nob

3. Build cano

./nob

The build files will be stored at path/to/cano/build.

5. Run cano

./build/cano

Normal - For motions and deletion
Insert - For inserting text
Visual - For selecting text and performing actions on them
Search - For searching of text in the current buffer
Command - For executing commands

Visual mode works the same as Normal mode, except it works on the entire selection, instead of character by character.

Search mode takes a string and finds it in the file. if prepended with 's/' then it will replace the first substring with the second.

Example: Using the following command

s/hello/goodbye

Will replace hello with goodbye.

There are a couple special keys for the key remaps.

The config file is stored in ~/.config/cano/init.lua by default, or can be set at runtime like so:

./cano --config <config_file>

The init.lua is the entrypoint of your cano configuration. You need to call the setup() function in order to make changes to the default configuration. Cano will setup the following default configuration for you if you decide not to configure anything by yourself.

setup({
	syntax = true, -- toggle syntax highlighting on-off
	auto_indent = true, -- toggle auto indentation on-off
	relative = true, -- toggle relative line numbers
	indent = 0, -- set indent (value of 0 stands for 1 Tab)
	undo_size = 16, -- size of undo history
})

The first parameter of the setup() function must be a table. You are free to decide which of the settings above you want to change. The settings that you don't provide will remain with their default value.

Therefore, it is also perfectly valid to call setup() with an empty table:

setup({})

There is also a way to interact with cano from your configuration. The setup() function returns a table of functions you can use to do so.

local cano = setup({
	syntax = true, -- toggle syntax highlighting on-off
	auto_indent = true, -- toggle auto indentation on-off
	relative = true, -- toggle relative line numbers
	indent = 0, -- set indent (value of 0 stands for 1 Tab)
	undo_size = 16, -- size of undo history
})

cano.exit(42, "Yoo")

The following functions are available:

---@param code The return code of cano on exit
---@param message This message will get printed on exit
function exit(code, message) end

There is a secondary config file, which is for custom syntax highlighting. It is stored in the same folder as the regular config, but uses a different naming format. An example is ~/.config/cano/c.cyntax (spelled cyntax, with a c). The c can be replaced with whatever the file extension of your language is, such as go.cyntax for Golang. Here is an example of a cyntax file:

k,170,68,68,
auto,struct,break,else,switch,case,
enum,register,typedef,extern,return,
union,continue,for,signed,void,do,
if,static,while,default,goto,sizeof,
volatile,const,unsigned.
t,255,165,0,
double,size_t,int,
long,char,float,short.
w,128,160,255.

There's a bit to unpack here, basically the single characters represent the type of the keywords: k - Keyword t - Type w - Word The type is then followed by the RGB values, all comma separated without spaces. After the RGB values, there is the actual keywords. End each type with a dot '.' as seen above, to indicate to Cano that the list is finished. The words are meant to be left blank, as it will highlight any words not found in the keywords above with the chosen RGB color. If you wish to only set the color, you can provide no keywords to any, and it will fill in the keywords with C keywords by default.

Config variables can also be modified at runtime by using :ser-var .... For now, the names of runtime config variables slightly differ from the names you would specify in your init.lua. This will most likely change soon.

relative # toggle relative line numbers
auto-indent # toggle auto indentation on-off
syntax # toggle syntax highlighting on-off
indent # set indent
undo-size # size of undo history 

A package is provided within this AUR. You can install it using your preferred aur helper:

For instance, if using yay, do the following:

yay -S cano-git

Cano's build system recently changed, Nix installation is not supported for now.

You may build from source and install cano directly to /usr/local/bin. You must have a basic C compiler and the ncurses library installed (install shown below).

sudo apt install gcc libncurses-dev
git clone https://github.com/CobbCoding1/Cano && cd Cano
gcc nob.c -o nob
sudo ./nob --install

The official Cano installer and manager, currently in Beta. canoon