A writing app for the terminal. No nonsense. Markdown. Local. Encrypted.
- Private. All your posts live in one file, encrypted with your password. Without the password nobody can read them.
- Plain markdown. You write markdown. Each post starts with a
# Title. It stays plain markdown on screen, formatted as you type: headings and bold in bold, italics in italics, code in green, with the markdown symbols faded. (Settings can tone that down to faded symbols, italics and green code, or turn it off.) Lists carry on as you press Enter, and Tab nests an item. - Mouse and keyboard. Click, scroll and press buttons with the mouse, or use shortcuts. The bar at the bottom of the screen shows the shortcuts for where you are, and you can click those too. While writing, Ctrl+K opens a menu of everything you can do, with each shortcut.
- Fits your terminal. It uses your terminal's own colours and font, and works in any modern terminal (Alacritty, Ghostty, iTerm2, and others).
writui is built in the open (what's planned). Remember: there is no way to recover a forgotten password.
On macOS or Linux, paste this into a terminal:
curl -fsSL https://writui.com/install.sh | bashIt downloads the latest writui for your computer, checks it, and puts it in
~/.local/bin. If that folder isn't on your PATH yet, it tells you the line
to add. (Read the script first if you like.) Check it worked
with writui --version.
Or download it yourself
The install script is also attached to every release:
curl -fsSL https://github.com/aakashns/writui/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash.
Every release has a ready-to-run file for each computer:
| Computer | File |
|---|---|
| Mac with Apple Silicon (M1+) | writui-macos-arm64 |
| Mac with Intel | writui-macos-x86_64 |
| Linux (most PCs) | writui-linux-x86_64 |
| Linux (ARM, e.g. Raspberry Pi) | writui-linux-arm64 |
Save it as writui in a folder on your PATH and make it executable
(chmod +x writui). The Mac files aren't signed: if you downloaded with a
browser and macOS won't open it, run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine writui
once. (The install script avoids this.)
writui upgradeThis checks for a newer version, shows what's new, and asks before replacing
writui with it (writui upgrade --yes skips the question). If the new
version stores your writing differently, it updates your vault the next time
you unlock it: it backs the vault up first, checks the result, and only then
removes the backup. Running the install script again also upgrades.
There's no ready-made Windows version, but you can build writui yourself:
-
Install Rust, the Visual Studio Build Tools (the "Desktop development with C++" workload), and Strawberry Perl (needed to build the encryption library).
-
In a new PowerShell window (not Git Bash, whose Perl can't build it), run:
cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/aakashns/writui
The build takes a few minutes. To upgrade, run the same command again.
writui isn't tested on Windows automatically, or tried out there by hand regularly, so please report anything odd. To run its automated tests and checks yourself, in the same kind of PowerShell window:
git clone https://github.com/aakashns/writui
cd writui
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warningsIf both finish without errors, writui's tests pass on your computer.
Follow the illustrated guide to create your vault, write your first post, and keep a version to come back to. Then tell us how it went.
Open a terminal and run:
writuiThe first time, writui asks you to choose a password (twice) and creates your vault: the encrypted file that holds all your posts. After that, it asks for the password each time it starts.
On a Mac with Touch ID, you can unlock with your fingerprint instead: tick
"Unlock with Touch ID" when you create your vault, or turn on "Touch ID" in
Settings (s on the list) later. writui then asks for your fingerprint
when it starts; after locking, press Enter or click "Touch ID". The
password still works too. It applies to this Mac only, and adding a new
fingerprint to the Mac turns it off until you next unlock with the
password. Your vault's key, sealed so that only this Mac's Secure Enclave
can open it after a fingerprint, is kept in ~/.config/writui/touch-id/.
To change the password, open Settings and choose "Change password": type your current password, then the new one twice. writui re-encrypts the vault with the new password, keeping a backup of it until the vault has reopened with the new password and passed its checks; if anything goes wrong, the old password keeps working. Touch ID is set up again for the new password on its own.
- Posts are listed with the most recently changed first. Open one with
Enter or a click, start a new one with
n(or Enter: "New" is highlighted when the list opens). The list's shortcuts are single keys, shown next to "New" and "Import" and at the bottom. Esc quits. writui opens where you left it: on the post you were writing, cursor and all. - Search: press
/(or click "Type to filter (/)") and type. Posts with every word you type, anywhere in their text or front matter, are listed, and the first is highlighted: Enter opens it, ↑/↓ pick another. Esc clears the search. - Sort the list by when posts were updated or created, or by title, either way round: click "Sort" on the right of the search and pick one, or press Tab (Shift+Tab) to go through them.
- Lock with Ctrl+O, wherever you are: writui asks for the password (or your fingerprint) again, then takes you back to where you were.
- Zen writing: the editor shows only your words. Hold Ctrl to see the post's word count and when you started it. (This needs a terminal that can report Ctrl on its own, like Alacritty, Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm or a recent iTerm2; in others, and inside tmux, they're always shown.)
- The menu (Ctrl+K, or Cmd+K on a Mac) lists everything you can do while writing, with its shortcut. Type to filter it, pick with the arrow keys and Enter, or click.
- Writing: type away. Your post is saved automatically as you go: a second after you stop typing, every few seconds while you keep typing, and when you go back to the list (Esc) or quit (Ctrl+Q). There's no need to save. When you reopen a post, the cursor is where you left it. The terminal window's title shows the post's title.
- Versions are snapshots you make on purpose, to read later or go back to. Ctrl+S asks for a name (like a commit message) and keeps a copy of the whole post as it is now.
- History (Ctrl+R) lists a post's versions. Open one to read it, and press Enter to restore it into your post (Ctrl+Z undoes that).
- Undo with Ctrl+Z and redo with Ctrl+Y (or Ctrl+Shift+Z, in terminals that tell it apart from Ctrl+Z). Undo goes back a word at a time while typing.
- Selecting: drag with the mouse, double-click a word, triple-click a
paragraph, or hold Shift while moving (Ctrl+A selects everything).
Typing or Backspace replaces what's selected. Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+X cuts
and Ctrl+V pastes, using the system clipboard (your terminal's own paste,
like Cmd+V, works too). Right-click for a menu with Cut, Copy, Paste and
Select All. Esc drops the selection. Copying a whole post and pasting it into an empty
one gives the same post, not a doubled
#. - Formatting follows standard markdown (CommonMark, plus GitHub's
~~strikethrough~~, task lists and tables), so text is formatted only when it really will be:**boldstays plain until you close it. Wrapped list items and quotes line up under their text. - Links: Ctrl+click a link to open it in your browser (or put the
cursor on it and pick "Open link" from the menu). That works for
[text](https://…)links and for web addresses written out in the text. Only web and email links open. - Moving by line, word and paragraph: Ctrl+Left/Right (or Cmd+Left/Right on a Mac, where the terminal passes Cmd on, as Alacritty does) go to the start / end of the line, like Home and End; pressed again, they go on to the start / end of the sentence or of the next line, whichever is nearer. Ctrl+Up/Down (Cmd+Up/Down) go to the start / end of the post. Option+Left/Right (Alt on Linux and Windows) jump by word, Option+Up/Down by paragraph. Add Shift to select as you go.
- Getting your writing out: Ctrl+Shift+C copies the whole post as
markdown, and Ctrl+Shift+S exports it to a
.mdfile wherever you choose (both are in the menu too, for terminals where Ctrl+Shift doesn't come through). Exports start with front matter (title, date, description, …) for site generators like Zola, Hugo and Jekyll, which you can edit or turn off. Tab completes the path, and the next export of the post goes to the same file, asking before it replaces it. The first export of a post starts in your Documents folder (or wherever you last exported or imported). - Bringing writing in: "Import" on the list (
i) makes a post of a.mdor.txtfile, keeping its front matter and dated when the file was made. Export it again and it goes back to that file, so you can edit a published post here. - Deleting (
d) moves a post to the Trash, where you can restore it for 30 days. - Settings (
son the list): your name, added as theauthorin exported front matter, how wide the text is while writing (68 characters unless you change it), how much markdown styling you see (full, minimal or off), and whether your terminal's font is a Nerd Font, so writui can use its icons. Under each setting is a line saying what it does now.
In the editor, Cmd works like Ctrl (Cmd+Z undoes, Cmd+X cuts, Cmd+A selects all, Cmd+K opens the menu) wherever your terminal passes Cmd on to programs. Cmd+V is your terminal's paste, which writui understands.
Cmd+C works too, in any terminal, with nothing to set up: whatever you select in writui goes on the clipboard right away, so it's there when you press Cmd+C (which the terminal keeps for itself). It doesn't get in the way of what you'd copied before: typing or pasting over a selection puts that back on the clipboard, and Cmd+V over a selection pastes it, not the selection. Ctrl+C copies too.
Cmd+K needs nothing in Alacritty (it sends Ctrl+L, which also opens the
menu). In Ghostty and iTerm2 it clears the screen unless you pass it on
the same way (keybind = super+k=unbind in Ghostty).
| Computer | Vault |
|---|---|
| Mac | ~/Library/Application Support/writui/writui.db |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/writui/writui.db |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\writui\writui.db |
It's a single file, so backing up means copying it somewhere safe. The copy
is just as encrypted as the original. writui info prints where your vault
and config file are, and which version of writui you have.
To keep the vault somewhere else (say, a synced folder), run
writui --db ~/path/to/writui.db, or make it the default by putting this in
~/.config/writui/config.toml:
vault = "~/path/to/writui.db"Ideas and bug reports are welcome in issues. To build writui yourself or work on it, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
writui is free and open source, under the MIT license.