nem

nem

A terminal text editor with nano's shape and emacs's keybindings.

One file, one screen, no modes — but C-f moves forward, C-k kills a line, C-x C-s saves, and the kill ring behaves the way your fingers expect.

 1 package main                      │  1 # notes
 2                                   │  2
 3 import "fmt"                      │  3 - ship the thing
 4                                   │  4 - write it down
 5 func main() {                     │  5
 6     // say hello                  │
 7     fmt.Println("hi", 42)         │
 8 }                                 │
▍main.go  go  ⎇ main ──────── 7:26  │  notes.md  md ──────── 3:0
Wrote main.go

Code is coloured, line numbers sit outside the text so they can never be selected, and the status line carries the file type and git branch. It keeps your terminal's own background rather than painting over it.

Install

Download a binary for your platform from the latest release, or:

go install github.com/Borderliner/nem/cmd/nem@latest

From source, with xmake and Go 1.27 or later:

git clone https://github.com/Borderliner/nem
cd nem && xmake
xmake run nem file.txt

xmake                                  # static, stripped build/<plat>/<arch>/release/nem
xmake f -m debug && xmake              # with symbols, for a debugger
xmake f --goos=windows --goarch=arm64 && xmake   # cross-compile
xmake install --user                   # into ~/.local/bin, no root needed
xmake install [-o DIR]                 # into DIR/bin, default /usr/local/bin
xmake test                             # gofmt, go vet, tests with the race detector
xmake bench -p ./editor -f Redraw      # benchmarks; xmake bench --help

The build sets CGO_ENABLED=0, which matters: Go turns cgo on by default when a C compiler is present, and a dependency pulls in os/user, which links libc for NSS lookups. With it off the binary is fully static — no libc, no glibc version skew, runs on musl and Alpine — and strips to about 5 MB. Without xmake, the same build is:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath -ldflags "-s -w" -o nem ./cmd/nem

Being cgo-free is also why every platform cross-compiles from any other, so releases for Linux, macOS and Windows on both amd64 and arm64 all come off one machine. Windows binaries are published but lightly tested; state lives under %LOCALAPPDATA% there rather than the XDG path used elsewhere.

What it does

Editing — the emacs motion and editing set: C-f/C-b/C-n/C-p, M-f/M-b, C-a/C-e, M-</M->, C-d, C-k, M-d, C-t, M-u/M-l/M-c. Cursor motion stops at grapheme boundaries, so a decomposed é or a ZWJ family emoji is one press, not seven.

The rest of the editing set — M-; comments or uncomments the line or the region in the file's own syntax, M-/ completes a word from words already in the text (again for the next), M-q re-wraps a paragraph - a comment block stays a comment block - and M-{/M-} move by paragraph. C-M-f/C-M-b jump over a bracketed group, string or word and C-M-k kills one. M-z kills up to a character, M-SPC and M-\ squeeze or delete the spaces around point, M-^ joins a line to the one above and M-m goes to its first non-blank character. M-= counts words and C-x = describes the character under point.

Indentation — TAB indents the way the file already does: a tab in Go or a Makefile, spaces elsewhere, as many as the file uses. nem asks the file's .editorconfig first, then looks at how the lines already there are indented, and failing both goes by the language: two spaces for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, YAML, Lua, Ruby, HTML and CSS, four for Python, Rust, C, Java, Kotlin, C#, PHP, shell and SQL, and a tab for anything it does not recognise. With a region, TAB shifts every line it touches a level right and keeps the region, so it can be pressed again; S-TAB shifts them back, and C-x TAB shifts them by the prefix argument in columns (C-u -2 C-x TAB is two to the left). Only indentation moves, so shifting left never eats text.

Regions and lines — C-x C-u and C-x C-l upcase and downcase the region. M-x sort-lines sorts the lines the region covers (in reverse with C-u), M-x reverse-region turns them upside down, and M-x delete-trailing-whitespace strips the spaces and tabs from the ends of the buffer's lines, or the region's. Each is one undo.

It remembers — M-p and M-n bring back what you typed at a prompt, in this session or an earlier one, and M-x lists the commands you used last first. C-x C-r opens a recent file, and a file opens again where you left it. C-u C-SPC jumps back to where the mark was - where a search started, where M-> jumped from - and again for the place before that. It is all kept in ~/.local/state/nem/memory.json.

Keyboard macros — F3 starts recording, F4 stops, and F4 plays it back; C-u 3 F4 plays it three times and C-u 0 F4 until it fails, which is how a macro runs down the rest of a file. F3 while recording inserts a counter that counts on as it plays. C-x (, C-x ) and C-x e work too. Searches and prompts inside a macro replay exactly, and playback stops at the first thing that fails, as in emacs.

Brackets and quotes pair themselves — ( gives () with point between, typing ) steps over it, and Backspace between the two removes both. Over a selection, ( or " wraps it. It holds back in front of a word, and an apostrophe stays single; nem.set("auto-pair", false) turns it off.

Mark and kill ring — C-SPC sets the mark, C-x h selects the whole buffer, C-w kills the region, M-w copies it, C-y yanks and M-y rotates. Consecutive kills accumulate into one entry, so C-k C-k then C-y gives you back what you took. Backward kills prepend, so M-DEL M-DEL over "foo bar" yanks as foo bar, not bar foo.

Buffers and windows — C-x C-f find file, C-x b switch buffer, C-x 2/C-x 3 split, C-x o move between windows. Two windows onto one buffer keep independent cursors and viewports.

Dired — C-x d lists a directory, C-x C-j lists the one the current file is in with point on it, and nem . or C-x C-f on a directory does too. The listing is aligned and coloured by kind, directories first and dotfiles hidden until you press .; ( hides the permissions, sizes and dates, and s sorts by name, time or size.

Each name has an icon for its kind - a folder, a language's mark, a picture, an archive - and so do the candidates at C-x C-f and C-x b. They need a Nerd Font, or a terminal that ships its symbols (Ghostty, Kitty and WezTerm do), so they turn on by themselves only where that looks true: in those terminals, or when an installed font has the glyphs. Over SSH nem cannot see your fonts; nem.set("icons", true) or false settles it.

Deleting asks you to type yes, nothing is replaced without asking, and a rename carries any buffer visiting the file along with it. One listing follows you around the tree rather than a new buffer piling up per directory.

C-x C-q makes the names editable, as emacs's wdired does, so renaming is text editing: M-% turns IMG_ into holiday- across every name, a keyboard macro numbers them, C-a and C-e go to either end of a name. Only names change; the rest of each line stays put. C-c C-c renames the files to match and C-c C-k forgets the edits. The renames happen together, so two files can swap names, and all or none of them do: a name already taken, or two files given one name, is refused before anything moves. A name with a / moves the file into that directory, and an emptied name flags the file for x.

Projects — the repository a file is in is its project (or the nearest directory holding a .projectile file, or failing both, a build file such as go.mod or package.json), and C-x p works on the whole of it, as projectile does. The prefix is emacs's own project.el one, since C-c is yours.

In the search results RET opens a match in the other window, n and p show each in turn there, { and } jump between files, and g searches again; M-g n and M-g p step through the matches from any buffer. Open files are searched as they are, unsaved edits and all.

A project's files come from git ls-files in a repository, so .gitignore is honoured; elsewhere the tree is walked, passing over node_modules and its kind. A .projectile file narrows the list with projectile's syntax: -/build or *.min.js leaves things out, +/src keeps only src.

Compiling — M-x compile runs a build, the tests, a linter, anything, and shows the output beside you as it comes; C-x p c does it from the project's top. The first time it offers what the project's build files suggest - go build ./... beside a go.mod, cargo build beside a Cargo.toml, make -k otherwise - and after that the command you ran there last. Every line naming a place in a file leads there: errors and warnings from gcc, clang, go, rust, tsc and javac, Python tracebacks, JavaScript stack frames, go test's failures. M-g n and M-g p step through them from any buffer.

In the output, RET goes to the error on its line, n and p show each in the other window, g runs the command again and C-c C-k stops it. A test failure that names only foo_test.go finds the one file of the project it can be, and asks which when several can.

Shell commands — M-! runs a command and shows its output: in the echo area if it is a line, in a buffer if it is more. C-u M-! puts the output at point instead. M-| runs a command with the region as its input, and C-u M-| replaces the region with the output, which is how anything becomes a filter: C-u M-| sort, C-u M-| jq ., C-u M-| column -t. A command that fails changes nothing. M-&, or a command ending in &, runs in the background into its own buffer. Commands run with sh, from the buffer's directory; C-g stops one you are waiting for.

Search — C-s is genuinely incremental: it moves as you type, backspace walks point back, and C-g returns you to where you started. Past the last match C-s says it is failing, and pressing it again wraps round to the top; C-r does the same going back, and turns a forward search round. M-% is query-replace with y/n/!/q, and C-M-% does the same for a regexp, with \& for the match and \1…\9 for its groups in the replacement (few terminals can send C-M-%; M-x query-replace-regexp always works). M-x replace-string and M-x replace-regexp replace everything after point, or in the region, without asking. M-s o is emacs's occur: every line of the buffer matching a regexp, listed like a project search's results, each leading back to its line. M-g i is imenu: a function, type, class or heading of the buffer by name, with its line beside it - for Go, Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, Rust, C and C++, Java and Kotlin, Ruby, Lua, shell, Makefiles, Emacs Lisp and Markdown.

Prefix keys, M-x, and C-u — C-x is a real prefix keymap, M-x completes over every command by name, with the keys that run each one shown beside it, and C-u takes numeric and negative arguments.

Undo — linear undo and redo (C-/ and M-_). Typing coalesces into one undo unit; a new edit after undoing discards the redo branch.

Help — <f1> b lists every binding, <f1> k describes a key. Pause on a prefix like C-x for a second and everything that can follow it is listed where completions go - at the bottom, or in the centred panel with completion-style set to "popup".

Completion — M-x, C-x C-f and C-x b list their candidates under the prompt at the bottom of the screen, as Vertico does, and filter them as you type, fuzzily: fwc finds forward-char. Matched characters are highlighted so you can see why something matched, and the windows shrink to make room rather than being covered. nem.set("completion-style", "popup") shows the same list in a centred panel instead. C-n and C-p step through the list, C-v and M-v (or PgDn and PgUp) page through it, and M-< and M-> jump to its first and last entries.

RET takes the highlighted entry, and on a directory it walks into it and lists what is inside. The directory itself comes first, as ./ before you have typed anything, so C-x C-f RET opens it in dired. M-RET takes exactly what you typed, for a new file or buffer whose name happens to match an existing one. Buffers are listed most recently visited first, so C-x b RET flips back to the previous one.

In a file prompt ~/ is your home directory, and typing ~/ or / after the directory the prompt opened on starts the path over from there, as emacs's minibuffer does: C-x C-f ~/notes/ needs nothing erased first.

Files that aren't text — a PDF, a photo, a song or a zip is not dumped into a buffer as garbage. nem asks: s opens it with your system's app for that type, t opens it as text anyway, and S or T answers the same for every file of that type for the rest of the session. To answer without being asked, set nem.set("open-binary", "system") or "text". M-x open-externally hands any file to the system app on purpose, and so does E in dired. With no desktop to open things on (over plain SSH, say) files open as text, as before. Opened as text, such a file is shown byte for byte as it is stored - uncoloured, never laid out right to left - and its mode line says binary.

Line numbers — shown by default, and drawn outside the text so they can never be selected or copied. C-x n toggles them. The line the cursor is on lies on a faint band, its number picked out on it; nem.set("hl-line", false) takes the band away. In dired and in search results the selected row is a slightly stronger band, under the row's own colours.

Right-to-left text — Persian, Arabic and Hebrew are written and shown right to left, their letters joined, as emacs shows them: most terminals do neither, so nem lays the text out itself, by the Unicode bidirectional algorithm. In prose a line takes its direction from its first letter, and one in Persian sits against the right edge; in code every line stays left to right, with any Persian in it - a comment, a string - reading right to left where it is. The arrow keys go the way the line reads.

Key bindings work whatever keyboard layout is switched on. With a Persian keyboard, Ctrl on the x key sends C-ط; nem reads it as the C-x it sits on, as emacs's reverse-im does - and the same for Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and Greek keyboards. Only where a key is a command: with Ctrl or Alt, after a prefix (C-x ب is C-x f), in dired's listing, answering y or n. Typed on its own, a letter is still the letter. Konsole, GNOME Terminal and mlterm lay the text out themselves, so there nem leaves it to them; nem.set("bidi", true) or false decides it.

Syntax highlighting — Go, Lua, JSON and Markdown have hand-written lexers; C, Python, shell, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, YAML, TOML, HTML, CSS, SQL, Makefile, Dockerfile, XML and INI are bundled into the binary. If nano happens to be installed, its definitions add about forty more. Nothing needs installing.

Selection — C-SPC marks, and the region is visible. Typing replaces it, Backspace deletes it, and that undoes in one step.

Moving text — M-<up> and M-<down> move the current line, or every line the region covers, keeping the selection so the key repeats.

System clipboard — C-w and M-w also put the text on your system clipboard over OSC 52, which works through SSH. C-y pastes what you copied in other applications, through wl-paste, xclip, xsel or pbpaste, and falls back to nem's own kill ring when there is no text to be had.

Pasting — the terminal's paste key inserts text verbatim, without re-indenting it, as a single undo step.

Your work is kept — a backup of the previous contents on first save, an autosave after 30 seconds' pause or 300 keystrokes, and a refusal to overwrite a file that changed on disk underneath you. A save replaces the file whole or not at all, so a full disk or a crash mid-save cannot leave it cut short. Closing the terminal, a dropped SSH connection or a shutdown writes every unsaved buffer away before nem exits, and a bug in nem is caught and reported rather than taking your work with it. Nothing is written beside your file; it all goes under ~/.local/state/nem.

.editorconfig — a project's .editorconfig is honoured: its indentation settings decide what TAB inserts, and trim_trailing_whitespace and insert_final_newline are applied when a file is saved - to the buffer, so what you see is what was written, and C-/ brings the whitespace back.

Files changed elsewhere — a buffer with no edits of its own follows its file: after a git checkout, a formatter, a build that generates code, it is read again by itself, as emacs's global-auto-revert-mode has it. A buffer you have edited is never touched behind your back. C-x x g reads any file again on request, asking first if that throws edits away; nem.set("auto-revert", false) leaves it to that.

C-h is bound to help too, but only works on terminals that negotiate the extended keyboard protocol. On older terminals the terminal itself cannot tell C-h from Backspace before nem sees it. Use <f1>.

Configuration

~/.config/nem/init.lua is a real Lua script, not a config format:

nem.set("tab-width", 4)
nem.bind("<f5>", "save-buffer")

nem.command("strip-trailing-space", "Remove trailing whitespace everywhere.",
  function()
    for i = 1, nem.buf.line_count() do
      nem.buf.set_line(i, (nem.buf.get_line(i):gsub("%s+$", "")))
    end
  end)
nem.bind("C-c w", "strip-trailing-space")

nem.hook("before-save", function(buf)
  if buf.path:match("%.go$") then nem.run("strip-trailing-space") end
end)

Commands you define are registered alongside the built-ins, so M-x finds them and <f1> k describes them. Line numbers are 1-based, and anything a script changes is undoable with C-/. A broken config never takes the editor down — the error lands in the echo area and nem carries on with defaults.

Scripts get string, table and math, but not io or os, so a hook cannot shell out to an external formatter. A formatter written in Lua against nem.buf works.

See docs/config.md.

Not yet

Mouse support · line wrapping (long lines truncate with $ and scroll horizontally instead) · undo tree · multi-line search patterns · indentation that knows a language's syntax (TAB follows the file's style, not its braces)

Design

Layered so the hard parts are testable without a terminal:

Two decisions worth knowing. The minibuffer is a real buffer in a real window, as in emacs, so C-a/C-e/C-k and the kill ring work inside prompts with no extra code, and M-x, C-s, find-file and query-replace are all callers of one mechanism. And commands never reach the screen — they act through an interface, which is why the whole command layer is tested headlessly.

The full design, including the decisions that were rejected and why, is in docs/design/2026-09-18-nem-design.md.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.

Released binaries are statically linked and so contain the permissively licensed libraries listed in THIRD-PARTY.md. nem reads nano's syntax definitions from the system when they are present but never distributes them; the rules it bundles are its own.