# martanne/vis

A vi-like editor based on Plan 9's structural regular expressions

Repository: https://github.com/martanne/vis
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/martanne-vis
Language: C
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: text-editor, structural-regex, modal-editing, console-application, c, lua
Last push: 2026-08-20T04:09:37+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 67/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 98, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4309, "days_push": 13, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4696, forks 280 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:57.134299+00:00)

## What it is
Vis is a vi-like modal text editor written in C that combines Vim-style modal editing with Plan 9 sam's structural regular expression command language and built-in multiple cursors/selections. It supports Lua-based extension and efficient syntax highlighting via LPeg parsing expression grammars.

## Use cases
- edit text in a terminal with vi-like modal keybindings
- use multiple cursors and selections for editing
- perform structural regular expression based text transformations
- extend an editor with Lua plugins
- edit large or binary files efficiently
- run a lightweight editor in resource-constrained environments

## When to choose
- you want vi-style modal editing with multiple cursors and sam-like structural regex commands
- you need a fast, lightweight terminal editor with Unicode support
- you want to script editor behavior in Lua

## When to avoid
- you need bug-for-bug Vim compatibility or Vim plugin ecosystems
- you want a GUI editor with built-in clipboard and file dialogs
- you rely on extensive IDE features like LSP integrations out of the box

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: editor, parser, plugin-system
- domain: text-editors, developer-tools
- platform: bsd, cli, cross-platform
- tags: modal-editing, vi-like, structural-regex, multiple-cursors, lua-extensible, terminal-editor, plan9, command-line, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- martanne/vis (main) score 67

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:57.134299+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:19:14.166044+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/martanne/vis (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:57.134299+00:00, sha 660e528922c8)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.