Why I built Nyxd.

The story

It started with wanting to understand editor architecture in Swift properly, so I went looking through the open-source projects that already existed. I'd been a heavy user of one of them for a long time, and the more I used it the more I could see exactly where I wanted it to go — so forking it felt like the obvious move. I started in on the parts I cared about most, replace-in-file being the first.

One feature at a time turned into a lot of features. And at some point it became clear the old core — TextKit, built for a different era of files — wasn't going to get me where I wanted to be. So the core engine became a totally new one, written from scratch, and everything built on top of it since has been new too.

Today

I use Nyxd Editor every day, many times a day — it's genuinely my own daily driver, not a side project I look at occasionally. I'm very happy with where it's ended up, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

There's a smaller story about the icon, too — I copied its composition from two other apps, and only worked out much later why that composition exists. Where the icon comes from →

Open to ideas

Still very open to new features. If there's something you wish Nyxd Editor did, just get in touch.