Product Design Engineer Viktor Antoniak was fed up with heavy IDEs taking too long to load and slowing down on his old computer when he just needed to quickly fix a couple of lines of code. So he decided to experiment and created his own super-lightweight code editor over the weekend.
Product Design Engineer Viktor Antoniak was fed up with heavy IDEs taking too long to load and slowing down on his old computer when he just needed to quickly fix a couple of lines of code. So he decided to experiment and created his own super-lightweight code editor over the weekend.
"I set myself a challenge for the weekend: to design the concept of a lightweight TUI code editor strictly for the specifics of UE C++," Viktor Antonyak said on LinkedIn.
The engineer didn't know the necessary programming language, Rust, so he took on the role of architect and designer: he thought out in detail how everything should work and look. All the code was written by the DeepSeek artificial intelligence according to his instructions.
"The entire technical implementation according to my clear TOR was generated by DeepSeek v4 via OpenCode Zen. The ready-made LSP/Clang was expectedly scattered on the volumes of Anrial, so I had to twist my lazy parser," Viktor noted.
The editor's feature is that it works directly in the terminal — it doesn't have a heavy graphical interface, so it starts instantly and doesn't load the computer at all.
Standard tools were "broken" due to the gigantic volumes of the Unreal Engine game engine. To make the program work quickly, the author and AI came up with a few tricks:
Since this is a terminal program, you can't use the mouse in it. Viktor came up with a convenient hotkey system from scratch: "Moving through the code is done using the arrows and Enter, and the focus between panels is switched using Tab and Shift + Tab. For convenient work with tabs, I selected Alt + arrows to switch between them and Shift + Alt + arrows to change their order, and instant focus on the console is called using the tilde. The current tab is closed with the combination Ctrl + W, and the editor itself is Ctrl + Q."
This is just a working concept, created purely for quick edits in working folders.
"The code under the hood is quite raw (typical AI generation), so I'm leaving the repository private, it's a shame to post something like that on GitHub," the IT guy added.
There will be no continuation, as Victor will soon buy a new powerful computer, so the need for such strict resource saving will disappear. However, he rated the experience of creating a complex system in tandem with AI in just a couple of days as "10 out of 10."
