Kaa is a small and easy CUI text editor for console/terminal emulator environments.

Kaa is an easy yet powerful text editor for console user interface, providing numerous features like

• Macro recording.
• Undo/Redo.
• Multiple windows/frames.
• Syntax highlighting.
• Grep.
• Open source software(MIT).
• More to come!

See http://kaaedit.github.io for more screen shots.

Kaa is very easy to learn in spite of its rich functionality. Only thing you need to remember is "To display menu, hit F1 key or alt+'/' key". Most of basic feartures could be accessed from fancy menus by hitting underlined character in the menu items. You can use kaa as easy as you are with Notepad on MS-Windows.

Kaa is written in Python. So, you can easily customize many aspects of kaa through simple Python scripts.

Kaa is a CUI editor that runs on most of modern UN*X flavor operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. Kaa requires Unicode friendly environment both platform running kaa and terminal emulator/console to interact with kaa.

Cygwin environment on Windows platform is not supported at this time, but will be tested after they provide Python 3.3 package.

To run kaa, you need following component:

• Python 3.3 or later

• Headers and libraries for Python and ncurses with wide character support. Consult documentation of your platform for details. For Debian/Ubuntu, you can install ncurses library by :

  $ sudo apt-get install python3-dev libncursesw5-dev 

• UTF-8 locales
• (optional) Cython

Use easy_install3 or pip3 to install kaa from PyPI :

$ sudo easy_install3 kaaedit

To start kaa, type :

usage: kaa [-h] [--version] [--no-init] [--init-script INIT_SCRIPT]
           [--palette PALETTE] [--term TERM]
           [file [file ...]]

positional arguments:
  file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show version info and exit
  --no-init             skip loading initialization script
  --init-script INIT_SCRIPT
                        execute file as initialization script instead of
                        default initialization file
  --palette PALETTE     color palette. available values: dark, light.
  --term TERM, -t TERM  specify terminal type

Kaa uses alt key for keyboard shortcut like alt+k. On most of recent Windows or Linux terminal, alt key works out of box. But on Mac OS X, Terminal app should be configured:

1. Select Preferences menu.
2. Open the Settings tab.
3. Open the keyboard tab.
4. Check Use option as meta key.

Or, if you use iTerm2 on Mac, you should configure:

1. Select Preferences menu.
2. Open the Profiles tab.
3. Open the Keys tab.
4. Check Left option Key acts as: +Esc. button.

If you use Gnome terminal and wishes to access menu by F1 key, you should configure:

1. Select Edit | Keyboard shortcuts menu.
2. Scroll to the Help/Contents shortcut and change key from F1 to some another key.

Kaa looks better with 256 color mode of terminal emulator. With Terminal.app you can set 256 color mode:

1. Select Preferences menu.
2. Open the Settings tab.
3. Select xterm-256color for "Declare terminal as" field.

For iTerm2, you can:

1. Select Preferences menu.
2. Open the Profiles tab.
3. Open the Terminal tab.
4. Select xterm-256color for "Report terminal type" field.

Otherwise, you should manually update terminal setting. e.g., If you use bash, add following line to ~/.bashrc file:

export TERM=xterm-256color

For detail, see http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/#256 to enable 256 color on your terminal.

Using kaa is intuitive. Typing alphabet keys will update file as you expected. Functional keys like arrow or delete keys also works.

To display menu, type F1 key or alt+/ (type slash key with alt key). Each items in the menu has one underlined character. The menu item is execused by typing the underlined key with or without pressing alt key.

Typing escape key hides menu.

Code menu differs among file types. Following items are typical in programming languages.

When regex button is checked, Replace string is also regular expression string. In this case, special characters like \t or \n are converted to tab character and newline character. Also, backreference character will be replaced to substring matched group in the search string. For example, when search string is '(a+)(b+)' and replace string is '\2\1', matched string 'aabb' will be replaced to 'bbaa'.

Grep dialog has three input field. Search is a plain text or regular expression string to search. Directory is a directory to start searching. If Tree button was checked, files are searched recursively. Filenames is space separeted list of file spec in shell-style wildcards (e.g., *.txt *.py *.doc). Up arrow key displays history of each input field.

In the grep result window, use F9 and F10 key to traverse matches forward/backward.

Unlike Python's interactive console, Python console in kaa does not execute Python script until you hit alt+Enter key. Until then you can edit Python script as if you are with editors without worrying about newlines and indentations.

When alt+Enter key was hit, all text in the window is executed as Python script and the value of the expression is printed out to console window. If the script contains print expression, the text will also be printed out to console window. If a part of text in the console window is selected, only text in the selected region will be execused.

Kaa executes a Python script file at ~/.kaa/__kaa__.py on startup. You can write Python script to customize kaa as you like.

from kaa.filetype.default import defaultmode
defaultmode.DefaultMode.SHOW_LINENO = True

defaultmode.DefaultMode is base class of all text file types. Line number is diplayed if Defaultmode.SHOW_LINENO is True. If you want to show line number of paticular file types, you can update SHOW_LINENO attribute of each file type classes.

# Show line number in HTML mode
from kaa.filetype.html import htmlmode
htmlmode.HTMLMode.SHOW_LINENO = True

Assign same keyboard shortcut of splitting windows command as Emacs.

from kaa.keyboard import *
from kaa.filetype.default.defaultmode import DefaultMode

DefaultMode.KEY_BINDS.append({
   ((ctrl, 'x'), '2'): 'editor.splithorz'    # Assign C-x 2 
})

In this example, key sequence C-x 2 (control+x followed by 2) is assigned to 'editor.splithorz' command.

Change color palette to light.

import kaa
kaa.app.DEFAULT_PALETTE = 'light'  # Use `light' palette. Default is `dark'

• Github project page
• Github repository
• Python Package Index(PyPI)

• Show table of contents in Markdown mode. Hit Ctrl+t to display TOC.
• Show table of contents reStructuredText mode. Hit Ctrl+t to display TOC.
• Improve highlighting in Markdown mode.
• Bugs fixed.

• Show table of contents in Python mode. Hit Ctrl+t to display TOC.
• Improve highlighting in reStructured mode.

• Add 'japanese' encoding that detects text encoding from file.
• Specify text encoding to grep file.
• New commandline option: --no-init, --init-script, --palette, --term.
• New color palette: dark, light.

• Markdown mode.
• reStructuredText mode.

• View diff between original file and current buffer.
• Grep dialog now has 'Dir' button to select directory.
• Handle SIGTERM to restore terminal state before exit.
• Prompt to reload file when file modified by other process.

• Paste from clipboard history.
• Word completion list now contains text from clipboard history.
• New command: New file here.
• New command: Open file here.
• New command: Open recently used file here.
• New command: Open recently used directory here.

• Basic word completion with ctrl+o.
• Display blank line if the line is selected.
• Various minor changes.

• Locate position of opened file where the file located last time.
• Changed history database scheme. By this change, old history will be deleted.
• Changed default color setting.
• Kaa didn't run if $TERM is 'xterm-color'.

• Rectangular selection can be started by Alt+'#' key.
• Window|Join menu caused error.
• File|Save all caused error.

• Python console window now works with Gnome terminal.
• Window|Switch file menu caused error.
• ^G (Goto line number) dialog shouldn't accept '0' if field is empty.

• Python console window.
• Emacs style region selection. Now you can select region by ctrl+SPACE or ctrl+'@'key.
• Changed some default keyboard binding.
• A lot of bugs fixed.

• Comment/Uncomment region.
• In replace dialog, replace-to text is now treated as regular expression text.
• A lot of bugs fixed.

• Grep
• Various improvements.

• New command: Close all.
• New command: Recently used file/directory.
• Search/Replace history.
• Line number display setting at menu | File | File Info.

• Incremental search.
• Accept directory name as command line argument.
• New command: Go to line(^g).
• New command: Select current word(^c).
• New command: Save all files(menu | file | Save All).
• Improve file open dialog.

• Misc commands.
• Highlight parenthesis at cursor.
• Support text encodnig other than utf-8.
• Other a lot of changes.

• Initial release.

Copyright (c) 2013 Atsuo Ishimoto

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.