I’ve been doing pet projects since I started programming computers more than 20 years ago 👴🏽️, besides learning a lot from these pet projects, they give me joy. I’m used to saying that ”Coding pet projects is my video game”.

But pet projects are only worth it if you use them, otherwise it’s an experiment, etc… something that will last for a few weeks and you move on to another thing of interest to have fun.

I used to write ruby code on QtCreator using a ruby language plugin, the problem is that I do not enjoy coding in Qt/C++ as I did some years ago, so maintaining this plugin up to date for every QtCreator API change was a pain. Long story short: Pet project archived and now I was in need for a code editor to write Ruby code.

In 2019 I fell in love with Crystal language ❤️ it had the good things I love from Ruby and the good things I missed from typed and compiled languages like C++. At the time there weren’t many choices to code in Crystal besides the slow VSCode and the generic non-free Sublime3.

Some experimental GObject binding generator existed, so it was possible to create GTK applications in Crystal, then I thought: why not create a code editor in GTK the way I want to!?

Tijolo was born 🧱️

I named it Tijolo, means brick in Portuguese, and started the project somewhere in 2019.

I wanted Tijolo to be very fast like terminal editors, easy to work with split views like my terminal at the time (Tilix) and keyboard focused.

With LSP and GtkSourceView I just needed to glue everything together with some Crystal code, easy like that.

However when I got around the version 0.7.0 I realized a list of problems with the project:

• Current GTK bindings had memory leaks, problems with Crystal GC and only supported GTK3.
• GTKSourceView API would make some of my ideas for the future harder to implement, besides the problem opening big files.

So I decided to rewrite Tijolo, the new Tijolo would:

• Be written in Crystal, the language that most bring me joy to code nowadays.
• Use GTK4 and don’t leak memory, so another pet project was born, GI-Crystal, a GObject binding generator.
• Write my own code editor widget instead of using GtkSourceView.
• Syntax highlighting would be backed by tree-sitter, so crystal-tree-sitter was born.

So far this plan is on track, however far away from an end.

• I created a GObject binding generator.
• I created nice GTK4 bindings using that generator.
• I created tree-sitter bindings.
• Tijolo GTK3 was simplified and ported to GTK4.
• I started to work on a primitive editor widget.
• I started to write a PieceTable shard to be used as the buffer of the editor widget.
• Then I started to realize the obvious, it was too many things to do for my free time.

Long story short, I decided to learn vim for the third time, but this time with more seriousness. I started the migration to neovim in December 2025 where things are more calm at work and it worked, since then I’ve been a happy neovim <3 user.

Conclusion

A few things happened.

• From tijolo way of handling editor views, Batata was born, it’s like a Tilix, I wrote it because there was no GTK4 version of Tilix.
• My GTK4 bindings are being used by some people, it’s good for the ego to know someone is using your code.
• I learned a lot about GTK, GObject and tree-sitter, a knowledge that I doubt will be useful in my professional life, but is always fun to know.
• I wrote RTFM, a GTK application used to read documentation in the dash format, I use it every day to read Crystal docs.
• I had kids (twins) and all my free time is gone.