antirez/kilo

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

9087 stars · 993 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Kilo is a tiny terminal text editor written in under 1000 lines of C, with syntax highlighting and incremental search, requiring no external libraries. It is designed as a minimal, readable codebase to learn from or extend into more advanced editors and CLI interfaces.

Use cases

• edit files in a terminal without installing heavy editors
• learn how a terminal text editor works internally
• use as a starting point to build a custom editor or TUI
• quick syntax-highlighted editing over ssh
• study minimal VT100 terminal handling in C

When to choose

• you need an extremely small, dependency-free terminal editor
• you want readable C source code to learn editor internals from
• you want a base to fork into your own TUI project

When to avoid

• you need a full-featured editor with plugins, macros, or extensive language support
• you need guaranteed stability - the project is alpha-stage and lightly maintained
• you need Windows-native terminal support without a VT100-compatible terminal

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

editor terminal-ui developer-tools text-editors developer-tools cli cross-platform c minimalist syntax-highlighting vt100 educational small-codebase command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="antirez/kilo")