A VIM-Like editor for your terminal (chat on Discord)

Important

Lilly is in a pre-alpha state, and only suitable for use by developers. This editor is technically usable, it is the exclusive editor used to work on itself, however many features are missing, and there is no guarantee of stable features or a lack of bugs. Features, bug fixes and issues are welcome.

Warning

(the master branch is currently in a slightly broken state, checkout commit bee9e01 for last known stable version)

An editor designed as a batteries included experience, eliminating the need for plugins. So, basically Helix but for VIM motions. The end vision is a one to one replacement/equivalent functionality for all VIM features, macros, motions, and more.

Current project state (as of Nov 2025)

Announcing PROJECT PETAL.

Good news or bad news? The bad news is that the refactoring efforts to migrate from line to gap buffer have stalled. The good news is this is because thanks to the new bobatea library I have been working on, it has made a full from scratch re-write of the editor necessary and totally worth it.

Bobatea is built ontop of Lilly's immediate mode TUI rendering backend which internally uses a double buffer backing grid to provide efficient cell by cell rendering to the host terminal emulator. The only cells which are re-drawn by bobatea are ones that have changed. The underlying V standard library term.ui module has been modified to provide separate loops for rendering and user input, and re-draws have been unchained to whiz up to whatever target FPS you want (Lilly asks for 60fps by default).

The libraries API has been intentionally designed to be a as close as possible experience to using the Go based bubbletea, from both end users and the devs building with it.

tldr:

Lilly is being re-written from scratch in conjunction with a new TUI library intended to bring bubbletea to the V community. If you would like to track this new implementation all the work is happening on the petal branch.

Milestone 1: A pre-alpha release

Targets:

• Gap buffer to replace string array
• Within line visual mode (kind of)
• Fix found search result highlighting
• Horizontal scrolling
• Splits (horizontal + vertical)
• Goto def
• List of active but not open buffers
• Search/Find files
• Workspace wide search (ripgrep + roll your own)

How to build (requires the V compiler https://vlang.io)

Build lilly by executing

./make.vsh build-prod

or run with no binary build with

./make.vsh run

You can see what other tasks are available to run with ./make.vsh --tasks

(you can compile make.vsh into a binary to make executing tasks as fast as possible, use ./make.vsh compile-make or v -prod -skip-running make.vsh)

Not convinced?

Not a problem, Neovim/VIM are fantastic existing projects and are freely available for you to use today.

misc + extra information

radicle.xyz remote

The Lilly project is also hosted by (approx minimum 20 seeds) on the decentralised peer-to-peer git host network "Radicle". If you would like to contribute using that instead of Github then please clone with: rad clone rad:zENt7TUiNcnJSf9H371PZ66XdgxE and then submit a patch in the usual git way but using the rad toolchain (see https://radicle.xyz/guides/user#working-with-patches)

Feel free to also raise issues here, I will hopefully remember to check the inbox frequently.

memleak checks

On macOS we get this output from running:

leaks --atExit -- ./lilly .

lilly(53176) MallocStackLogging: could not tag MSL-related memory as no_footprint, so those pages will be included in process footprint - (null)
lilly(53176) MallocStackLogging: recording malloc and VM allocation stacks using lite mode
Process 53176 is not debuggable. Due to security restrictions, leaks can only show or save contents of readonly memory of restricted processes.

Process:         lilly [53176]
Path:            /Users/USER/*/lilly
Load Address:    0x10294c000
Identifier:      lilly
Version:         0
Code Type:       ARM64
Platform:        macOS
Parent Process:  leaks [53172]

Date/Time:       2024-12-05 11:07:02.409 +0000
Launch Time:     2024-12-05 11:06:46.429 +0000
OS Version:      macOS 13.2.1 (22D68)
Report Version:  7
Analysis Tool:   /usr/bin/leaks

Physical footprint:         4513K
Physical footprint (peak):  4529K
Idle exit: untracked
----

leaks Report Version: 4.0, multi-line stacks
Process 53176: 226 nodes malloced for 22 KB
Process 53176: 0 leaks for 0 total leaked bytes.

Look at that. 0 memory leaks.

(experimental GUI render target)