I have been exploring Zig and wanted a project that let me practice concepts from Data Oriented Design, TigerStyle (links in the readme for context on those) and simplified approaches to manual memory management that have intrigued me the last couple of years. I wanted something wildly different to Clojure (my beloved daily driver) and Zig has been a fantastic tool to explore these concepts. I'm a big fan of Bacon (check it out if you use Rust) and wanted to have a similar tool for my Zig projects so here we are. I like to think it's about 80% of Bacon's functionality in only about 20% of the code. It was a really cool moment when I was able to start using Vigil, itself, to help during the rest of it's development.

On a meta level, HN actually got me into software development years ago when I stumbled onto it while doing research for a short story I was writing. If I recall correctly I read something by Paul Graham about Lisps and decided to give programming another shot. I started with Clojure as my first language, began learning about the terminal and vim/emacs, and it's been a really fun journey ever since. I now work professionally in the industry and it's a cool moment for me to break my lurking ways and submit a humble little terminal tool of my own to HN. Anyways, a big thank you to the community for that.