AutoEdit: a code and text workspace
AutoEdit is the Auto ecosystem's lightweight text editor. Browsing, comparing, and reviewing code are priorities alongside everyday editing and saving. Native desktop use guides its current development. Auto sources organize application logic and interfaces, with editing and rendering foundations supplied by AutoLang and AutoUI.
All applications · System apps and examples
Start with a file in a project
The project tree helps you browse directories and open files in separate tabs. The editor displays line numbers, syntax highlighting, and Chinese text. Menus, the toolbar, and keyboard shortcuts provide common operations; recent files help you return to previous work.
A typical sequence is to find a file, open related tabs, read and make focused edits, save, and compare the changes. The console provides operation feedback, while the status bar reports cursor position, encoding, and line endings.
Editing, search, and file saving
- Multiple tabs: create, open, save, undo, redo, and confirm closing unsaved changes.
- Find and replace: case sensitivity, whole words, regular expressions, escapes, replace all, and search across files.
- UTF-8 handling: recognize BOM and line endings, with line-ending conversion. An invalid-UTF-8 fallback avoids silently transcoding and saving unreadable input.
- Sessions and recent files: remember open files and the active tab, loading files on demand after restart. Restoring open files and restoring unsaved text are separate capabilities.
Large-file handling reduces unnecessary highlighting and full-document operations. Practical limits and performance depend on the runtime and operation; development measurements are not presented here as universal performance guarantees.
Compare files, directories, and editing buffers
Comparisons support reading and checking changes after editing.
| Object | How it can be used |
|---|---|
| Two files | Read side-by-side or unified differences and navigate between change blocks |
| Two directories | Inspect unchanged, modified, added, and removed entries, then compare individual files |
| Open buffers | Compare editing content that has not all been saved, separately from disk-file comparisons |
You can jump from a comparison to the corresponding file, edit, save, and compare again. This differs from editing directly inside a diff row, which still needs further development. Directory synchronization includes confirmation; check the destination and affected entries first.
Its role in AI-assisted work
AutoEdit provides a place for people to read, review, and refine text. Longer-term integration includes agent-driven operations and embedding shared editing components in other applications. AutoMusk organizes coding-agent tasks; those integration directions do not make AutoEdit a completed agent system.
AutoEdit and AutoJade remain separate products. AutoEdit emphasizes code, text, and change review; AutoJade emphasizes documents and their knowledge relationships. They aim to share components while describing their product capabilities independently.
Current progress and runtime
The core editor code is settled. The project's M4.4 closeout records completed editing, search, comparison, and the current performance acceptance. These results describe that tested configuration; release downloads and broader platform coverage have their own delivery conditions.
The source project lives in specs/auto-edit in the auto-edit repository. With the matching Auto toolchain and sibling dependencies prepared, start the VM desktop window in dark mode:
cd specs/auto-edit
auto run -r vm --theme darkA Vue generation path and a Rust portable build path also exist. The Rust interface still needs debugging and visual validation; the captures here use VM/Iced. Desktop and web prerequisites and feature coverage need separate confirmation. Consult the relevant version's delivery notes for releases, installation, and performance measurements.
Project progress was checked against the M4.4 closeout on 2026-10-10. Screenshot captions identify their actual runtime and capture date.