Another editor worth mentioning here is Micro (https://micro-editor.github.io/), written in Go, which is also a TUI editor, is hackable not only because open source but also in the sense you mentioned (with plugins written in Lua), and (exceptionally for a TUI editor) it has the "usual" default keybindings that all of us non-Vim and non-Emacs diehards are accustomed to (Ctrl+S for save, Ctrl+F for find etc. etc.).
This is something I've wanted back when I was doing professional PHP development, when life was still in black and white. I still reckon it would be useful today.
I started to build exactly that myself, in Nim, but got distracted building the editor itself and eventually moved on to other personal projects. Maybe I should revisit it.
An example, based on the current HN home page, would be htmx integration in HTML editing, that is aware of the rest of your project and how htmx works to give excellent, powerful autocomplete within your bindings. Maybe even have it be able to be aware of the backends route set!
But... Don't they already do that? I am a daily vim user and there is a million plugins that were created using those "hooks" you talk about. I guess that's the case with emacs too.
Just two days ago I jumped into a huge bazel project and needed a good way to navigate through 100s of files that are connected through @funny//labels/across/directories/and.files. By only reading vim's :help, I was able to write that 10lines of code which hooks into the existing "go-to-file" or "find-where-this-is-defined" functionality.
(In fact, after "implementing" this feature, I was wondering how I'd do this as a user (not as a plug in author) in any other editors.)
It was borne specifically out of my difficulty extending Vim to do what I was after when working with PHP frameworks!
Basically, I'd like the editor to understand the AST of the language(s, including mixed-language files, which is really hard) and be able to hook into parts of that AST to say "while this is a string, it's really this weird DSL that hooks into Javascript, so look for symbols here, here and here".
Its definitely possible to make Vim, Emacs and TA work this way, but its a lot more work than I had in mind, when I tried to extend them (well, not Emacs. It might be best at this, I'm just not a good emacs user) to achieve what I was after at the time, which was understanding the dependency injection annotation patterns from Symfony in PHP.
I think one could get pretty close with LSPs and the powerful AST parsers we have nowadays. Though doing it fast might be difficult!
I use the lite-xl fork https://lite-xl.com/
Neovim?
Sounds like emacs in text mode
(Though I doubt the statement re: Zee < 10ms latency in practical terms. I think only xterm and Terminal.app are consistently below that in terms of pure terminal latency)
This looks to be a hobby project, and it looks very professional and presentable, so good work! I like it!
But if you wanted to entice me to download and try it, I'd argue you have to give me something new. I would prefer more reasoning about why things are the way they are (keybinds are done because X). I'd prefer something that can be hacked upon (vim, Emacs, kak, etc all have scripts). I'd prefer something different (the entire window has physic simulation and typing too fast causes a massive loading force on the indents). Etc.
But this is your project, do what you want! well done!