minimide – Hackable Code Editor
A small, Atom-style desktop code editor in about 6,700 lines of JavaScript, with plugins, LSP, a terminal and git built in.
- A 16-module core; every feature, including built-ins, is a plugin on the same public API
- Language Server Protocol client with presets for TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go and C/C++
- Sandboxed renderer, with all system access through a single preload bridge
- Release CI that builds installers for macOS, Windows and Linux
The idea
The editor you can read in an afternoon. Atom showed that an editor built entirely from plugins is a joy to customise, but it grew too big to understand. minimide keeps that idea in a codebase small enough to read end to end.
Architecture
- Small core: commands, keymaps, config, a workspace with split panes and tabs, the editor, fuzzy matching, schema-driven settings, and a package loader that gives each plugin a scoped API.
- Everything else is a plugin: the 13 built-in packages load through the same API that third-party plugins use, and editing a plugin or config file reloads it live.
- Security model: the renderer has no Node.js access. Every system call goes through one preload
bridge with context isolation and sandboxing, and plugins load from a custom
mide://protocol.
Features
- LSP client: completions, diagnostics, hover, go-to-definition, references, rename, code actions and formatting
- Integrated terminal (xterm.js and node-pty) and a task runner for npm, Make and Cargo
- Git: branch switcher, file status, and gutter change markers from its own Myers diff implementation
- File tree, fuzzy finder, command palette, project-wide regex find and replace, Markdown preview and three themes
Published plugins
I also wrote and published three small third-party plugins against the public plugin API. Each runs sandboxed and asks for no permissions:
- Insert: inserts a UUID, the date or time, a timestamp, a random password or lorem ipsum, from a picker that previews each one
- Word Goal: shows the word count of the current file against a goal in the status bar
- Pomodoro: a 25/5-minute focus timer in the status bar, with configurable lengths
Tech
Electron, CodeMirror 6 and Lezer, xterm.js, esbuild and electron-builder, with GitHub Actions building and publishing installers on every tagged release. The plugin API is fully documented.