pile is a minimalist, native scratchpad editor for keeping hundreds of unsaved
notes alive without ceremony.
The core promise is an invisible hot exit: users should be able to paste text, close the app, lose power, restart, and find their working set restored without ever being asked to save. The editor is not an IDE. It avoids project trees, terminals, LSP integration, and workspace management in favor of fast text capture, reliable restoration, and low-friction navigation across many buffers.
- Keep the UI thread responsive and deterministic.
- Store document text in a rope, not a contiguous
String. - Treat persistence as automatic infrastructure, not a user workflow.
- Prefer content-aware behavior over filename or extension assumptions.
- Add only editor essentials: tabs, search, replace, multiple cursors, line numbers, and a minimap.
- Keep the architecture ready for hundreds of active scratch buffers.
This first slice establishes the native egui app, rope-backed documents, a debounced background session saver, content-detection scaffolding, and shared agent documentation. The editing surface is intentionally plain for now; richer editor behaviors should build on the same state and persistence boundaries rather than replacing them.
Architecture notes for the current editor split, app command flow, search state, and edit transaction direction live in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.