Bitters

Bitters is an open-source text editor. It's heavily inspired by the Canon Cat computer: it builds on the Cat's novel ideas, and adds some of it's own to the mix!

bitters screenshot

Bitters makes use of LEAP—one of the Cat's most famous legacy―to simplify text editing. Leaping, also known as incremental search, allows the writer to jump directly to the letter they target, without having to use the arrow keys or the mouse. Here is how it goes. First we press the LEAP key. Then we start to type a pattern. The cursor jumps to the closest occurence of the pattern. That's it! Anything can go in a pattern: letters, spaces, RETURN, and special characters like PAGE and DOCUMENT. Of course, there's much more depth to it. But magic lies in how simple it is and how much it enables! On Bitters (and the Cat), the LEAP key is used to do about everything: correct typos, navigate the text, look up information while editing, highlight text, move it around, and more.

Bitters is written in ANSI C, and depends on SDL2. It should run on any platform where SDL2 can be run. It's still a work in progress, so expect bugs to happen! But let me know if you find any. :)

How to get started

  1. Compile from the source.
  2. Read the manual.
  3. Enjoy using Bitters!

m15o at posteo dot net