Kern is the beefy love-child of Emacs, iA Writer, and Obsidian — the text editor I've always wanted.

Kern combines the editing from Emacs (movement, the kill-and-yank ring, grouped undo, mark and region, incremental search that jumps as you type), the writing surface from iA Writer (live markdown styling as you type with no preview pane, plus a typewriter mode that pins your line and scrolls the page beneath it), and the linking from Obsidian (type two brackets to complete a note name, ⌘-Return to follow the link under the cursor, ⌘-Shift-N to split a selection into its own note). It opens to today's note each morning and saves as you write.

It's native, small and free — a thin Swift shell around an editor written in C that draws every character itself. No Electron, no plugins, no toolkit between you and the text. That's why it doesn't choke on big files: open a 100 MB note — 1.3 million lines — and scroll, search, and jump to the end with no spinner; it opens in under a tenth of a second.

The world doesn't need another text editor. But I do. And maybe you, too?