The Kalem Book GitHub

This Book describes Kalem's main branch, which may be ahead of the latest release.

The Kalem Book

Kalem is a fast, open source editor for plain-text documents. It shows Org, Markdown, LaTeX, CSV, BibTeX and code the way they read, bold as bold and tables as grids, and keeps the file on disk the standard text it was, byte for byte where you did not edit. It runs in a window and in a terminal with the same commands, and its command-line tools serve scripts and CI.

This book is the one reference for Kalem, in four parts:

  • Part I, Kalem: the manual.
  • Part II, the standard formats: what Kalem does with each format it opens and against which reference that is tested, precisely enough to serve as the reference for other implementations.
  • Part III, extending Kalem: commands, keys, completers and plugins.
  • Part IV, design: the design documents, the decisions, performance and terminal parity.

The appendices list every command, setting and command-line option, generated from the code at each build. The book at the main branch describes the main branch; its source is the book/ folder of the repository, in Org, and kalem book build turns it into this site.