A bare-bones graphical editor for Typst files, with a strong bias for Right-to-Left editing.
For University, I have a need to write documents that are mainly in Hebrew but also heavily incorporate math and inline English terms. For me, any solution is preferably offline, efficient to write (i.e. does not require building equations by selecting parts from a toolbar) and runs on Linux natively. I ran across Typst, a typesetting system which ticks all of these boxes and has very good BiDi support right out of the box, which makes it very attractive.
The question is now which text editor to use with it? Typesetting input files are a bit weird in that they are source code, but primarily consist of natural language. When that language is written from right to left, code editors typically don't display that too well - even if the final result looks good, it is hard to write and harder to edit. Even the better ones don't align different parts to their natural order. Plain text editors tend to be better, but lack many conveniences that make working on source nicer.
Therefore Katvan is a new editor application, with a very specific focus on this particular use case; starting with a plain text editor that gets the basics right (at least for me), and goes from there.
Not a whole lot so far, but for now we have:
Ctrl+RShift
/LShift
, or Firefox style Ctrl+Shift+X
)[^1]: Previews are currently rendered by running the entire file through the Typst CLI after each change. It is plenty fast at least for smaller documents, so good enough for now.
Regardless of how Katvan is installed, it is required to install the typst
CLI and make it available via the system path or by placing it next to the katvan
executable. Without it previews and PDF export will not work. See here for details.
A pre-built AppImage for the x86_64
architecture is available from the project releases page. If it isn't suitable, you'll need to compile from source. Note that it contains the spell checker library, but not any dictionaries; install any required hunspell dictionaries system-wide from your distribution's repositories.
A build for 64-bit Windows 10/11 is available from the project releases page. Note that this is a portable build, which will store settings and the personal dictionary file in the same directory as the main executable, so make sure to extract the archive in a writable location. To write settings to the registry instead, run the katvan.exe
binary with the --no-portable
flag.
This build does not include spell checking dictionaries. You'll need to download hunsepll dictionaries for any desired languages (as a pair of .dic
and .aff
files), and save them to the hunspell
sub-directory next to the main executable file. See the hunspell README page for locations to get dictionaries from.
To compile and install Katvan from source code, you'll need:
pkg-config
Get those from your distribution repositories, vcpkg, or wherever.
To build, perform a usual CMake invocation. For example, on Linux this might look like:
mkdir build
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --build build -t install
Contributions aren't really expected. Issues and PRs in Github are open to create, but please don't expect much. This exists to scratch my personal need, and made available in hope it is useful for others with similar needs.
A few things I'd like and may happen at some point, in no particular order: