A batteries-included modal editor. Tree-sitter, git, and LSP are meant to be built in, not plugins.
bi stands for Bart's IDE. It exists because I wanted an editor where all the things I love about Neovim and its plugins are built in rather than assembled, where one person can hold the whole thing in their head, and where an update never breaks the setup.
That means bi occasionally varies from standard vim/neovim behavior — good defaults stayed, some things work differently. docs/GENERAL.md notes each difference where it happens.
C/C++, Go, C3 and Rust are first-class citizens: they get grammar, LSP and testing attention first. Everything else is best-effort.
Disclaimer: bi is a 100% AI-driven project — it started as an experiment and led to a working editor.
Grab the tarball for your platform from the latest release, then:
tar xzf bi-*.tar.gz
sudo mv bi-*/bi /usr/local/bin/biOn macOS, clear the quarantine flag so Gatekeeper lets it run:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/biThen set up your config:
bi config init # writes ~/.config/bi/config.toml, defaults commented out
bi config edit # opens the config directory in bi:reload inside bi re-reads the config without restarting.
Or build from source with cargo build --release.
- docs/GENERAL.md — everything: status, key bindings, commands, config
- docs/specs — the design behind each piece
- CONTRIBUTING.md — what contributions fit