This project is currently a seedling, which I am hopeful will grow into a useful front-end for xi editor.
It makes some decisions which are fairly unusual for GUI software written in 2017. It targets winapi directly, rather than using a toolkit, and is written in Rust. The main reason is so that we can target performance; winapi has api's for Direct2D rendering that may enable significantly lower latency and smoother scrolling than accessible through a toolkit. Part of the reason for taking on this project is to quantify the relative performance.
Other important dimensions of performance are startup speed and executable size.
Given the goals of this project and the (current) flux in the xi protocol, I expect the focus of this project to be input and rendering pipelines, with less emphasis on features; it may be a while before this is really useful as an editor. That said, I certainly welcome any help in getting there sooner.
We gladly accept contributions via GitHub pull requests. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.
If you are interested in contributing but not sure where to start, there is an active IRC channel at #xi on irc.mozilla.org. There is also a subreddit at /r/xi_editor.
The main author is Raph Levien.