Previously known as gxi, Tau is a modern GTK frontend for a very interesting text editor called Xi editor. Xi editor was initially intended just for macOS using the Cocoa GUI.

The whole point of this Linux text editor is to be lightweight and fast, all while keeping the configuration options at a minimum.

Before anything else, I have to point out that the Xi-editor project is currently discontinued. The project is not "dead dead," as Xi-editor can be still tried out in another form (and under a different name), namely the Lapce editor.

Why would anyone use a text editor that's based on another text editor, built for another platform entirely? The simplest answer is that it manages to retain every single thing that made Xi editor very good.

For starters, it's super fast. Because the app supports Unicode fully, and because the GUI is GTK and it's written in Rust, the whole experience is a very good one in terms of speed.

In theory, all editing operations should be under 16 ms (the original goal for the Xi editor). The whole experience is not particularly super modern, as the GUI doesn't impress in terms of looks, but once again, it's very fast.

Another goal of the Xi editor project was reliability. The developers who built it back in the day wanted to make a very stable text editor, and as far as I can tell, this has trickled down to Tau as well.

The whole experience is a simple one indeed, but that's not to say that the app doesn't feature some decent configuration options. From the Settings menu, you can tweak a wide range of aspects.

There are two main configuration tabs: View and Editor. From the View section, you can tweak the hand margin, enable or disable elements such as the word count, highlight the current line, and full path in the title bar, and wrap lines at the end of the view.

There's also an option that makes the text editor restore the last opened files on start-up, and various other options for syntax selection and syntax configuration.

From the Editor section, you can tweak the indention and highlight spaces, as well as tweak a few aspects regarding how the app saves files and the default shell to start.

It may not be the fanciest, the newest, or generally the most impressive text editor on the market, but Tau is an honest app. It stays true to its origins providing users with an authentic Xi editor experience.