🪶 Meet mel — probably the world’s smallest terminal text editor with native LLM integration.
102KB. Pure C. No curses. No dependencies beyond libcurl.
And yes — it talks to Ollama, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini right from the editor buffer.
Built from scratch at Art2Dec SoftLab as part of the mshell Ecosystem.
For larger projects — meet mide, a full GTK4 IDE with the same LLM integration, file tree, multi-tab editor, terminal, and AI chat built in.
⚡ What makes mel different:
✅ 102KB binary — fits in any container, pod, or IoT device
✅ Also available as a fully static binary (6.1MB, zero dependencies) — drop it anywhere, no install needed
✅ 15 languages syntax highlighting — C/C++, Rust, Go, Python, Java, Bash, mshell, JS, JSON, SQL, PHP, XML, Ruby, Lua
✅ Full UTF-8 — Russian, Japanese, Chinese, CJK — correct cursor, backspace, and display
✅ Native LLM integration:
• Ctrl-W — full-screen prompt editor → sends to LLM switch router via mshell, inserts response at cursor
• Ctrl-K — connects to any local or remote Ollama-compatible model via simple config file
• Works with Ollama, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — whatever your stack uses
✅ System clipboard — Ctrl-T paste from xclip/xsel/pbpaste
✅ Undo/Redo · Search & Replace · Go to line · Column marker · Backup
🖥️ Built for everywhere:
- Kubernetes Pods and Docker containers — single binary, zero setup
- Cloud VMs — AWS, GCP, OCI — x86_64 and ARM64
- IoT and embedded — Raspberry Pi 4/5 ARM64 (Debian 12/13)
- Desktop — Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 LTS, macOS Sequoia (Intel & Apple Silicon)
- Works in any POSIX shell — bash, zsh, sh, mshell
⚙️ Tech:
🔹 Pure C (C99) — single source file, no curses, direct VT100 terminal control
🔹 libcurl + libjson-c for LLM REST API integration
🔹 GPL3 license — free to use, modify, and distribute
📖 Documentation & binaries on GitHub:
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/igor101964/mel
• Keyboard Shortcuts cheatsheet (PNG/PDF) → /cheatsheets
• Full User Guide PDF → /docs
• Pre-built binaries for all above platforms → /binaries
OpenSource #C #Linux #RaspberryPi #macOS #TerminalEditor #LLM #Ollama #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #mshell #Art2DecSoftLab #DevTools #Kubernetes #Docker #IoT #UTF8
