In a previous post, I did a survey of options for literate programming options, and landed on Helix as a good solution, due to:
- Speed (Helix is written in Rust and is quite snappy)
- Healthy supply of built-in features
- Simple configuration
However, it doesn’t have any support for Jupyter notebooks, so it requires a little bit of finagling to get a good setup, and each setup is terminal-dependent.
Then I read this blog post on the “Emacsification of Software” - basically, about how LLMs are enabling personal app development. So in that spirit, I decided to try building out a brand-new text editor that had all the features I wanted, i.e. a Helix-style experience with Jupyter support.
A few days of prompting Claude Code later, and I managed to get something usable, which I’m calling sakharov after the great Soviet physicist and dissident.
It features:
- Cross-cell LSP support in notebooks
- Code & cell folding
- Async code execution
- Image support (in terminals that support it)
It’s certainly not at feature parity with any major text editor on the market, but I still think it’s pretty neat. You can find a link to it on my Projects page.