Editora 0.13.0: a navigation release

August 26, 2026 · 0.13.0

Editora 0.13.0 is out. It is a code-navigation release: four gaps that mattered, closed together. Grab it from the releases page.

Navigation is judged on two things. Reach — can the thing be found at all? Flow — can you jump without losing your place? Editora’s plumbing was in good shape on both, and the fundamentals underneath them were not: nothing was ranked, symbols existed only if you had installed a language server, five separate finders each asked you to decide what kind of thing you wanted before you could type its name, and every jump cost you your place.

One picker instead of five

Search Everywhere searches commands, project files and symbols at once, so you can type the name of the thing instead of first choosing which finder it lives in. A leading >, # or @ restricts it to commands, files or symbols for when you do already know — VS Code’s sigils rather than invented ones, since the muscle memory already exists.

Results stay grouped by source rather than interleaved on raw score, which sounds like a presentation detail and isn’t. The sources differ in size by orders of magnitude — tens of thousands of symbols, thousands of files, a few hundred commands — so a flat merge hands the whole list to whichever is biggest and the other two effectively disappear. Each source gets a guaranteed share, the groups compete on their best result rather than their bulk, and the overall cap trims a group’s tail instead of dropping a source outright.

Symbols without a language server

LSP is off by default and needs a server you install yourself, so for a first-run user — or for any of the twenty-odd languages that ship a grammar but have no server — “go to symbol” simply did not exist.

Go to Symbol in Project now works on a first run, from Editora’s own declaration scanner, across sixteen language ids. A running language server remains the better answer and still takes precedence; this is what there is when there isn’t one.

The index is built lazily, on first use. Walking every file the moment a project opens spends real work for someone who may never ask it anything, and asking for a symbol is the justification. The first query pays for the walk — under a second on a 650-file project — and after that it is incremental, rescanning exactly the file you saved from the text already in memory.

It under-reports on purpose. A missing declaration costs you one fallback to search; an invented one sends you somewhere that does not exist and teaches you not to trust the feature.

Everything is ranked now

The pickers only ever asked whether a candidate matched, never how well, so a scattered accidental hit ranked alongside a clean prefix one — and recent files, open buffers, bookmarks, snippets, projects, themes and LSP references were not ranked at all, showing matches in source order.

The new matcher scores contiguity, word and camelCase boundaries, exact case and compactness, matches whitespace-separated terms in any order (toggle git finds Git: Toggle Blame), and knows a path’s basename from its directories. The alignment is computed by dynamic programming rather than greedily, which is the difference between mc meaning the two humps of MainController and meaning whichever c happens to come first.

Rows now embolden the characters actually responsible for the match. The command palette previously ranked with one algorithm and emboldened with another, so the highlight could point at characters the ranking had never considered.

Jumping without losing your place

Sticky scroll pins the enclosing scope headers above the viewport. A header already on screen is not pinned — that would cover the real line with a copy of itself — and when the chain is deeper than the cap the outermost entries are kept, because the innermost scope is the one you can infer from the code in front of you.
Peek Definition shows a definition over the editor and leaves your place, scroll position and tab count where they were. Most of the time the question is only a signature and a few lines of body — an answer that does not justify the move. Enter still commits to the real jump.
Preview tabs make browsing cost one tab, not one per glance. The reused slot’s title is italic — the same “not durable yet” convention the unsaved marker uses. An already-open file is never demoted into it: it earned its place by an earlier deliberate open.
Recent Locations lists the session’s trail newest-first with the line you were on, which is the thing you actually lost when a jump took you elsewhere. It reads the same trail Back walks, so the two can never disagree.
Picker preview shows the highlighted row in the editor as the selection moves, and dismissing the picker puts everything back. The undo is half the feature — without it, arrowing through a list and pressing Escape leaves you wherever the cursor stopped.
Go to Related File pairs a file with its counterpart — a test and the class it tests, a header and its implementation, a component and its stylesheet. These are conventions rather than facts, so Editora proposes candidates in preference order and offers only the ones that exist; a convention being wrong therefore costs nothing, which is what lets the list be generous.
Go to Definition in a Split puts the definition in a new editor group and leaves the origin where it was.
Bookmark mnemonics give a bookmark a single character that jumps to it from anywhere in the project. A mnemonic is unique within a project — 3 means one place, not one place per file — because a name that resolves to several locations is a menu, not a shortcut.

Windows finally shows up in “Open with”

Windows hands a file manager’s chosen file to an application as a command-line argument, and nothing maps an extension to Editora unless the installer says so — so until now the MSI installed an editor that no file manager could hand a file to. It now registers for the text and source types it edits.

It does not take over your existing defaults: on Windows 8+ the shell’s per-user choice wins over anything an installer writes, so a type you already open with something else keeps opening with it. An extension nothing else claims does fall to Editora, which is the wanted outcome for the likes of .tfvars.

The Linux .deb also now describes itself properly in GNOME Software — name, summary, description, MIT licence, homepage and release notes — instead of “Unknown License”, “No details for this release” and a generic gear icon. None of that came from the desktop entry, which was already correct: a software centre reads AppStream metadata, and the package shipped none.

Less memory, faster start

Peak memory is down from ~908 MB to ~653 MB on a four-file session, measured on the installed package against a copy of a real configuration. The initial heap was never pinned, and the JVM’s default for it is 1/64 of physical RAM clamped up to the maximum heap — so on a large-RAM machine the whole 2 GB heap was committed before the application started. Stop-the-world pauses got better rather than worse (19.6 → 4.2 ms median), because a small young generation copies far less per collection.

The undo history and the decoded-image caches are now bounded by size, not by count: keeping 50 whole-document snapshots is not a memory bound when the entries differ in size by three orders of magnitude. On a 472 KB file, 50 edits cost 50 MB before and 34 MB after.

Startup also reaches its first frame ~46 ms sooner, by entering through a plain launcher so the configuration can load on a background thread while the JavaFX toolkit starts.

The complete list is on the What’s New page.