I Built My Own Text Editor

Description and use

cdin is a lightweight, fast, and hackable text editor built from a fork of lite, with C handling rendering and Lua handling behavior, ideal for low‑spec machines.

Problem

Create a lightweight, keyboard‑centric text editor that performs well on a weak machine and is highly customizable.

Outcome

cdin is a small, fast, and hackable editor that feels personal and performs well on low‑spec hardware.

Workflow

• Forked the lite editor from GitHub
• Renamed the fork to cdin
• Removed unnecessary features
• Replaced SDL2 with SDL3
• Rewired project structure
• Split code into C (window, renderer, SDL bindings) and Lua (behavior, plugins, keybindings, config)
• Built and tested on a weak machine

Evidence

I’ve wanted to build a text editor for a long time…

Source

cdin is a lightweight, keyboard-centric text editor with Vim-style modal editing.

Source