Quark – A hackable text editor for the 31st century.

Do you like Atom for its hackability and JavaScript familiarity, or Emacs for its power and ignorance of the mouse? Maybe you would hack Emacs but condemn Elisp to the pits of irrelevancy (or maybe you’re short on parentheses), or perhaps you would use Atom but find the mouse entirely too disruptive of your keyboard crusades. Either way, Quark can help you out.

About / Features

Quark is a hackable text editor made for programmers. It runs entirely on the command line by using Blessed to create a Curses-like user interface, and provides a lot of functionality similar to what is provided by Atom. Here are some features Quark hopes to have that you can glance over:

• It’s not written in a dead language! If you were born after the UNIX Epoch, you’ve probably never heard of Lisp, and if you know what it is you likely know how much of a waste of time it is to learn. If you know Lisp, and don’t hate it with a burning passion, you might want to use Emacs instead. It has more functionality than we could ever hope for.
• No bloated Electron shell! Slowing you down, wasting space on your hard drive, and wasting even more time requiring platform-dependent compilation. No thanks.
• No npm rip-off for a package manager! You want to add functionality to Quark? Make an npm package like a sane Node developer. And do it on the command-line like a boss.
• No build process! Why waste time compiling CoffeeScript when it can’t even do real block scoping, or any other ES6 tricks for that matter? What’s more, Quark uses good old JSON for premium integration with JavaScript, allowing data to be require()’d by Node and get parsed/stringified without any external libraries.
• Seamless performance! Something Atom can’t boast quite as handily. Like most Node.js apps that don’t require an entire web browser shell to operate, you can expect more or less half the performance of native C++ machine code. Enjoy.

Prerequisites

All that fun stuff said and true, we do have some requirements… here are the bylaws and trilaws that you probably want to know about Quark before you jump in. You will need a system capable of running the latest minor LTS release of Node.js (currently 6.9) with npm. Note that your terminal must be capable of interactive standard I/O.

The Quark Pitch

Note: This is purely comedic/satirical and is not intended to be taken seriously under any circumstances. Original work by our friend the man George Carlin.