About

pardes (פרדס) — an orchard; also the four levels of interpretation. A text’s meaning is not just a simple reading.

Everything the user sees lives in one core: layout, panes, modes, selection, click semantics, themes, and the text of the interface itself. It is a state machine — you feed it events, you read a grid of cells back out, and it asks for the things it cannot do itself. Each shell owns an event loop, translates its platform’s input into that one vocabulary, draws the grid, and answers those asks. A shell that answers spawn differently is not a fork; it is the same program somewhere else, which is why the browser build is the real editor rather than a viewer written twice.

The modal layer is held to helix’s behaviour by two differential suites. One replays several hundred key sequences against goldens recorded from a real helix; the other runs the same sequences twice inside Pardes, once in a file pane and once in a shell, and demands the two agree. A divergence fails the build until somebody writes down why it is deliberate.