Swim

A Vim-like terminal text editor written in pure Swift with zero external dependencies. Works on macOS and Linux.

Features

• Modal editing — Normal, Insert, Visual, and Command modes with familiar Vim keybindings (h/j/k/l, dd, yy, p, i, v, :, /, etc.)
• Piece Table — efficient text data structure (same as VS Code)
• Syntax highlighting — three levels:
  • Semantic tokens via LSP (sourcekit-lsp)
  • Built-in tokenizer for Swift, C, C++, Python, Rust, Go, JS/TS
  • Fast JSON highlighting
• File explorer (Ctrl+E) — sidebar with directory tree
• Git panel (Ctrl+G) — staged/unstaged files, commits, diff with color highlighting
• Project search (Ctrl+F) — recursive file search with grouped results
• Full UTF-8 support — Cyrillic, CJK, emoji
• Tokyo Night Storm theme
• Status bar — mode, filename, file type, encoding, cursor position

Install

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install akvilary/swim/swim

macOS / Linux (curl):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akvilary/swim/main/install.sh | bash

Specify a version:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akvilary/swim/main/install.sh | bash -s v0.0.1

Custom install path:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/akvilary/swim/main/install.sh | DESTDIR=~/.local/bin bash

Build from source (requires Swift 6.0+):

git clone https://github.com/akvilary/swim.git
cd swim
swift build -c release
cp .build/release/Swim /usr/local/bin/swim

Usage

swim              # Open empty buffer
swim <file>       # Open file

Key bindings

Key	Mode	Action
i	Normal	Enter Insert mode
Esc	Any	Return to Normal mode
v	Normal	Enter Visual mode
:	Normal	Command line
/	Normal	Search
h/j/k/l	Normal	Navigation
dd	Normal	Delete line
yy	Normal	Yank line
p	Normal	Paste
Ctrl+E	Normal	File explorer
Ctrl+G	Normal	Git panel
Ctrl+F	Normal	Project search

Commands

• :w — save
• :q — quit
• :wq — save and quit
• :q! — force quit
• :e <path> — open file
• :%s/old/new/g — substitute

Project structure

Sources/Swim/
├── main.swift              # Entry point
├── App/
│   └── Application.swift   # Main event loop, rendering, LSP
├── Core/
│   ├── Cell.swift           # Screen cells, colors
│   ├── Theme.swift          # Tokyo Night Storm palette
│   ├── Terminal.swift       # Low-level terminal I/O
│   ├── PieceTable.swift     # Text buffer
│   ├── Input.swift          # Key parsing
│   └── SyntaxTokenizer.swift # Built-in highlighting
├── Window/
│   ├── EditorWindow.swift       # Editor with modes
│   ├── FileExplorerWindow.swift  # File explorer
│   ├── GitPanelWindow.swift      # Git panel
│   ├── SearchWindow.swift        # Search
│   └── StatusBarWindow.swift     # Status bar
└── LSP/
    ├── LSPClient.swift      # sourcekit-lsp client
    └── LSPProtocol.swift    # LSP data types

License

MIT