Developer(s) Reuben Thomas Type Text editor | Operating system | |
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Initial release April 2008; 8 years ago (2008-04) Stable release 2.4.11 / February 26, 2014; 3 years ago (2014-02-26) License GNU General Public License | ||
Zile is a free software, Lua-based toolkit for developing text editors. Zile stands for Zile Implements Lua Editors.
Originally written in C by Sandro Sigala, it was rewritten in Lua and is now maintained by Reuben Thomas.
Zile's goal was to behave like GNU Emacs using fewer resources. Zile still uses the same names as Emacs does for its functions and variables, but some of the internal data structures and API are evolving to suit a more general purpose.
History
Zile started out as a lightweight Emacs clone in April 2008. It was written in C, then rewritten in Lua. In 2014 it began evolving into a software development framework for developing text editors.
The lightweight Emacs that was Zile is now Zemacs. In the tradition of recursive acronyms, Zile stood for Zile Is Lossy Emacs. Zemacs is distinguished by a RAM Memory footprint, of approximately 100kB. It is 8-bit clean, allowing it to be used on any sort of file that doesn't require Unicode support.
Zemacs' keyboard shortcuts are similar to those of Emacs. It incorporates many standard Emacs features, including:
Zile produced a Vi clone, Zi.
A fork of Zile became Zee, a command line editor.