What is the state of the project ?

[sucrecacao]

Hi !

I'm confuse about the state of the project

I saw the video of Raph Levien at Recurse Center , I though the project was awesome. Then I found Raph's the postmortem article announcing the end of the project. And now I see that people still contribute to the GitHub repo.

As a newbie, I couldn't understand Raph article. I think it was addressing xi's community and contributors.

Did the project stop because it reached a dead end or did it stop because it didn't reach some expectation ? Do xi still have a future ? If yes what would it be ? Is xi current state a viable backend option to build a text editor or is this just an experiment ?

Thanks

[jansol]

TL;DR: as a standalone editor the project has effectively ended, but the components and research are kept alive and well by an active community

As a text editor I'd say the project is in "maintenance mode" where it gets occasional fixes but no active feature development. However the project has sparked a fairly active community over on zulip as well as a number of crates for text editing, vector rendering, cross-platform GUI and related tasks, all of which are being used and actively developed by said community.

Active development on a full text editor stopped mostly because the main developers shifted focus to cross-platform GUI (started from xi-win and later turned into druid). The GUI work got (AFAIK) funded as part of the runebender so naturally incentives for prioritizing work on that are higher.

Experimenting with rope structures and asynchronous operations as means to scale to arbitrarily large file sizes was a major goal of the text editor project and has been largely successful. Another goal was to build xi-editor as sort of a guide for text editor developers, so the theory and findings have been documented in detail.

The xi-editor core and related crates are perfectly usable for building a text editor as evidenced by xi-mac and Tau. (other frontends might be in similarly usable shape as well, but I have only tried these two)