The Open Rho Project

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The rho editor is released under the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike License 3.0

In memoriam, Daniel Michael Lawrence, 1958 - 2010

Rho is a small, very configurable console-based text editor with Bash/Emacs key bindings. It compiles on POSIX systems and on OS X. The configuration file (~/.rhorc) allows the user to create macros using not only any internal function but anything available to a shell command. These macros can be used to redefine internal functions as well. Macro creation is extensively documented in rho's online help (Ctl-X H). Rho includes a general template solution and a general macro solution. The pairing of create-script and execute-script allows users to create templates which are injected into buffers which can be executed, trapping stderr and stdout. The source function allows for a keyboard's worth of macros to be installed for each kind of task, the next sourcing overwriting the last. Rho does not yet use UTF-8. It does work in 8-bit locales.

RELEASE rho-1.1.14

source tarball or binary package
This is a port release. Rho itself is unchanged. Aria Stewart has contributed a port to OS X which should (almost) work on other BSDs. See README for ported compilation instructions. The binary package, a standard tar.gz, is also a Slackware package. See instructions for source, root and user install in README.

The Open Rho Project

I'd like to encourage anyone who uses rho and who enjoys hacking, optimizing, or porting to have fun with this little editor. So here are the guidelines for contributions:

Contributions must be programming-editor features. In C. And let's leave tool-chain functions in the macros and not re-invent them in the editor. Same goes for not adding simple things, like transpose-lines, that can be easily done with macros.
Contributions are submitted as altered versions of the most recent complete rho tarball. They must have a #define switch in rho.h and #ifs (NOT #ifdefs) elsewhere as necessary. Switch set to 0, rho is the original, unchanged version you started with. Switch set to 1, your contribution compiles in with an absolutely clean compile.
Contributions must be non-restrictive. If you do the UTF-8, the code needs a permanent switch for utf/non-utf compile. If you do syntax-highlighting, the syntax engine needs to work for any language.
Your name, email, and a brief description of your contribution needs to be added to the bottom of the license header. And reasonably comment your code in your own language. I can use google_translate to move it to English.

That's it. If it's in line with these guidelines, I'm here to bring it into rho.

Thanks to the following individuals:

Aria Stewart for her persistence and for the OS X port
Humphrey (nascent codehead) for inspiring the installation options in the README.
Vlado (my friend who works too hard) for fixing the $TERM issue for X11.
Patrick Shanahan (Dos Equis aficianado) for chasing down a rhorc problem.
Gabriel Emerson (casual rho user) for pointing out that I cannot count to ten.
Andrew Bishop (cxref author) for his cxref fix for a legacy file.
sbb (friend and Vim user) for testing rho on his French box.
Jean-Pierre Demailly (ported uemacs to Linux) for his encouragement.
Dan Lawrence and all his friends for all the pre-GNU era expansion of uemacs.
Dave Conroy for sharing his original uemacs in 1985.

Thanks to the following distributions for including rho in their packages:

Questions? Contact rho_at_tuxfamily_dot_org.

For more fun with tiny C editors, see the essence project.

And finally, we have the uemacs museum.

author's home page (off-site link)