Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust

sinelaw.github.io

40 points by _sinelaw_ 5 hours ago

I built Fresh to challenge the status quo that terminal editing must require a steep learning curve or endless configuration. My goal was to create a fast, resource-efficient TUI editor with the usability and features of a modern GUI editor (like a command palette, mouse support, and LSP integration).

Core Philosophy:

- Ease-of-Use: Fundamentally non-modal. Prioritizes standard keybindings and a minimal learning curve.

- Efficiency: Uses a lazy-loading piece tree to avoid loading huge files into RAM - reads only what's needed for user interactions. Coded in Rust.

- Extensibility: Uses TypeScript (via Deno) for plugins, making it accessible to a large developer base.

The Performance Challenge:

I focused on resource consumption and speed with large file support as a core feature. I did a quick benchmark loading a 2GB log file with ANSI color codes. Here is the comparison against other popular editors:

  - Fresh:   Load Time: *~600ms*     | Memory: *~36 MB*
  - Neovim:  Load Time: ~6.5 seconds | Memory: ~2 GB
  - Emacs:   Load Time: ~10 seconds  | Memory: ~2 GB
  - VS Code: Load Time: ~20 seconds  | Memory: OOM Killed (~4.3 GB available)

(Only Fresh rendered the ansi colors.)

Development process:

I embraced Claude Code and made an effort to get good mileage out of it. I gave it strong specific directions, especially in architecture / code structure / UX-sensitive areas. It required constant supervision and re-alignment, especially in the performance critical areas. Added very extensive tests (compared to my normal standards) to keep it aligned as the code grows. Especially, focused on end-to-end testing where I could easily enforce a specific behavior or user flow.

Fresh is an open-source project (GPL-2) seeking early adopters. You're welcome to send feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.

Website: https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh

fcoury - 32 minutes ago

Shameless plug: I did a series a couple years back, before AI was this huge, about writing a Vim-like editor in Rust, in case you want to play with it in the future:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9KpW-9Hl_het1V3_dLhG...

giancarlostoro - 2 hours ago

I'm a little annoyed that for a Rust based tool the recommended installation command is to use npm. Why? Is Cargo not good enough? Cargo seems exceptionally well to me.

Barathkanna - an hour ago

I get the frustration, but I think the npm option actually makes sense here. A lot of users who’d benefit from a fast Rust tool aren’t Rust developers and won’t have Cargo installed. Shipping it through npm lowers the barrier while still giving everyone the performance benefits. It’s not a knock on Cargo, just a way to make the tool more accessible.
- ljm - an hour ago
  
  Given the fairly shoddy security story with NPM, I genuinely don't understand the hesitation to publish a binary and have a README instruction to curl/wget it into `/usr/local/bin` or `~/.local/bin`. If it's going through NPM that publishing step has to be done already, unless the NPM build is pulling down rust to compile it all as a native extension.
  Eventually it'd wangle it's way into homebrew or the unstable branch of another package registry.
  But that's me, because I really dislike installing binaries via a language's package manager, because they don't get updated unless I frequently run the upgrade commands for each package manager.
  - _sinelaw_ - an hour ago
    
    That (security ) is something I also worry about. I'd like to get off npm if only for this reason. It's a hack to get started.
    The other thing it gives you is the ability to easily upgrade and uninstall so just a script to copy stuff is not on par.
    
    ljm - 34 minutes ago
    
    Thing is… who is regularly running `npm update` or `cargo update` to keep local software up to date?
    I wouldn’t, because I might be in a repo and it starts upgrading all my local dependencies, and I’m not gonna add a text editor as a dev dependency. I’ll happily take the binary, or a tar.gz with the binary in it, though.
    (Btw I love how it’s following the old DOS aesthetic)
    
    _sinelaw_ - 24 minutes ago
    
    The npm distribution here is just the binary, you run npm install again and it upgrades to the latest binary. That's convenient
_sinelaw_ - 2 hours ago

I did it because not everybody has cargo installed. I'm using cargo-dist to create this npm package.
- giancarlostoro - an hour ago
  
  I've been wanting a generic package manager for a while that is cross-platform. I wonder how one could find funding for such a project. Thinking about users from various OS' installing tools and software from your niche package manager, yeah that bad boy is going to grind to a halt if you have no key funding.
  - venturecruelty - 15 minutes ago
    
    Artifactory exists. It's not hard to store packages and metadata somewhere.
- baq - 32 minutes ago
  
  consider wget or curl if possible (why not if npm was...)

arkensaw - an hour ago

I tried it, I like it a lot, but I did find an issue straight away.

I'm on MacOS and I have remapped the fn and command keys so it can be more like Windows (I can't undo 20+ years of muscle memory, and also I just don't wanna)

Anyway, Fresh seems to ignore the remapping - it's back to the command key for copy/paste and the command palette.

Is there a way to access the dropdown menus by keyboard? I can see F underlined for File but no modifier key seems to make it happen

_sinelaw_ - an hour ago

I'll need to look into this, not sure what remapping does to the incoming key events.
Also I'm already working on a ui for customizing the key bindings so you could do whatever you wanted. (Currently managed by undocumented json)
Thanks for reporting!

Findecanor - an hour ago

> Efficiency: Uses a lazy-loading piece tree to avoid loading huge files into RAM

I once started writing a text editor on Linux, and first went down a similar route: a piece table over a mmap()'d file. But I abandoned using mmap, because Linux file systems typically don't have mandatory locking enabled, so you can't be sure that the file data won't be modified by another program.

(Then I got bogged down in Unicode handling... so 95% of the code became just about that, and I tired of it)

_sinelaw_ - an hour ago

I considered using mmap to help manage the caching but what if your file is hosted on S3 or whatever? (Something I'm planning to support eventually)
So I opted for explicit management of chunks, also gives me more control and consistent cross platform behavior.

az09mugen - an hour ago

Thanks for this cool project ! I was desperate to find more modern terminal editors with CUA mode. There is micro which is already good, but I wanted something more and hope your editor will fill that space.

simlevesque - 2 hours ago

I hate to be that guy, but did you know about Fresh, Deno's official frontend framework ? [1] If your app wasn't using Deno for extensibility it wouldn't be such a problem but since it is, I think it's gonna make searching for both harder.

[1] https://fresh.deno.dev/

byyoung3 - 36 minutes ago

selection is broken on mac eg cntrl+shift+right switches terminal tabs

ericb - 2 hours ago

I took a look--it seems like you can pass a path on the command-line to open to. Can you pass a line number, also?

_sinelaw_ - 2 hours ago

No, but that's a good idea, I'll add that
- ericb - 2 hours ago
  
  Also--cool editor!

- 42 minutes ago

[deleted]

gigatexal - 2 hours ago

love me a new text editor, here for this!