Textivus

Textivus is a fast, friendly terminal (TUI) text editor for Linux (and macOS) inspired by the simplicity of nano/micro and the familiarity of DOS EDIT — with modern comforts like multi-file buffers, incremental find/replace, and syntax highlighting.

A text editor for the rest of us!

Status: Early but usable. Expect breaking changes, but minor ones, before v1.0 (especially to defaults and configuration). See the changelog for upgrade notes.

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Quick start

Install (Linux/macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cornish/textivus-editor/main/install.sh | sh

Install system-wide

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cornish/textivus-editor/main/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- --bin-dir /usr/local/bin

Or download binaries from GitHub Releases.

Run

textivus README.md

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Why Textivus?

Textivus is for people who want a comfortable, familiar editor in the terminal without turning their console into an IDE.

• Instant startup (no indexing, no plugins, no waiting)
• Modern shortcuts by default (Ctrl+S / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Z)
• Classic look (DOS EDIT-inspired menu/status bars)
• Great for SSH (includes OSC52 clipboard support)
• Sane features: just enough power, without bloat

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Features

• Instant startup — no bloat, just editing
• Customizable theming — built-in DOS EDIT, light, dark and other themes; fully customizable
• Modern keyboard shortcuts — Ctrl+S, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, etc.
• Configurable keybindings — customize shortcuts via Options menu
• Multiple encodings supported — UTF-8/UTF-16, Western European, and CJK encodings (Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, GBK/GB18030, EUC-KR)
• Multiple buffers — edit multiple files with fast switching (Alt+< / Alt+>)
• Recent files & directories — quick access from menus
• Favorites — star frequently-used files/directories
• Mouse support — mouse supported, but optional; click to move cursor, drag to select, scroll wheel
• Shift+Arrow selection — select text the modern way
• Word wrap — toggle via Options menu
• Line numbers — toggle via Options menu or Ctrl+L
• Syntax highlighting — auto-detected by file extension
• Minimap — document overview with click-to-navigate; Kitty graphics or text-based fallback
• Find & Replace — Ctrl+F to find, Ctrl+H to find and replace
• Go to Line — Ctrl+G to jump to a specific line
• Cut Line — Ctrl+K cuts the entire current line (like nano)
• Word & character counts — displayed in the status bar
• Clipboard support
  • System clipboard integration:
    • X11: xclip / xsel (install required)
    • Wayland: wl-clipboard (wl-copy, wl-paste) (install required)
    • macOS: pbcopy / pbpaste (built-in)
  • OSC52 clipboard support for remote SSH sessions
• Undo/Redo — Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y with full history

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Supported encodings

Textivus can open and save files in the following encodings:

Encoding	ID	Notes / Aliases
UTF-8	utf-8	Default
UTF-8 BOM	utf-8-bom	UTF-8 with byte order mark
UTF-16 LE	utf-16-le	UTF-16LE
UTF-16 BE	utf-16-be	UTF-16BE
ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)	iso-8859-1	latin1
Windows-1252	windows-1252	CP1252
ISO-8859-15 (Latin-9)	iso-8859-15	Includes €
Shift-JIS	shift-jis	SJIS, MS_Kanji
EUC-JP	euc-jp
GBK	gbk	GB2312
GB18030	gb18030
EUC-KR	euc-kr

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Non-goals

Textivus is not an IDE.

• No project indexing
• No always-on language servers
• No plugin marketplace
• No telemetry

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Keyboard shortcuts (essentials)

• Save: Ctrl+S
• Open: Ctrl+O
• Quit: Ctrl+Q
• Find: Ctrl+F
• Replace: Ctrl+H
• Go to line: Ctrl+G
• Undo / Redo: Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y
• Cut line: Ctrl+K
• Switch buffers: Alt+< / Alt+>

Full shortcuts list: docs/shortcuts.md

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Clipboard support (Linux)

For clipboard integration with other applications, install one of:

# X11
sudo apt install xclip
# or
sudo apt install xsel

# Wayland
sudo apt install wl-clipboard

Without these tools, copy/paste will still work inside Textivus, but won’t integrate with other apps.

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Build from source

Requires Go 1.21+.

git clone https://github.com/cornish/textivus-editor.git
cd textivus-editor
go build
./textivus [filename]

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License

MIT