A plain text editor for the desktop and terminal, written in Rust. Speed and a quiet, responsive interface come first.

Early beta: 0.1.0-beta.1 is prepared as a draft. The full v1 specification is still in progress. See beta status and release notes before evaluating it with copies of important files.

Features

• Desktop and terminal interfaces: use the native GUI or the keyboard-driven TUI from the same application. Force either with --gui or --tui.
• Everyday file editing: tabs, new/open/save/save as/save all, recent files, reopening closed tabs, undo/redo and recovery journals.
• Editing tools: multiple cursors, rectangular selection, indentation, comment toggling, line operations, go to line, whitespace display and word wrap.
• Search and navigation: in-file find/replace, case and whole-word options, regex support, folder search, a command palette and fuzzy file navigation. Search completeness and folder replacement remain beta limitations.
• Configurable controls: VS Code, Notepad++ and Vim keymap presets, custom bindings and TOML settings, with settings interfaces in both frontends.
• Text encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16 LE/BE, UTF-32 LE/BE and supported stateless legacy encodings, including Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, GBK, Big5 and Windows-1252. Untouched encoded bytes and malformed-byte provenance are preserved by the shared text/save engine. Per-file encoding and line-ending commands are unfinished.
• Hex editing: inspect physical bytes and edit in hex, with an explicit text/hex choice for binary input.
• Syntax highlighting: bundled language support and a generic fallback for other text, with background highlighting work.
• Markdown preview in the GUI: text, preview and split modes, including supported local images. Rendered preview is limited to 256 KiB of logical source.
• Rendering designed for remote desktops: event-driven updates, a CPU renderer and remote-mode controls. Cross-platform damage and remote bandwidth budgets still need qualification.

These describe implemented areas to try, not a promise of complete GUI/TUI parity or acceptance of every v1 requirement. Compare views, formatter execution, log following, custom themes and accessibility remain incomplete. Any-size opening, resident index memory limits, full allocation admission and published performance budgets are also unfinished. ISO-2022-JP is explicitly unsupported.

Try it

The beta uses raw executables for Windows, macOS and Linux, on x64 and ARM64. After publication, download the matching assets and SHA256SUMS from Releases.

On Windows, keep the matching pair together as kwil.exe and kwil.com:

.\kwil.exe notes.txt
.\kwil.com --tui notes.txt

On macOS or Linux, make the downloaded executable runnable, rename it to kwil and run:

./kwil notes.txt
./kwil --tui notes.txt

Beta binaries are unsigned and installed/replaced manually. Stable installers and the auto-updater do not select beta releases. See the installation guide for stable-release requirements.

To build from source, use scripts/run.bat on Windows or scripts/run.sh elsewhere. Add --release for an optimized build or --tui for terminal mode.

Screenshots

Actual beta TUI sessions captured through a hidden Windows ConPTY and rendered from recorded terminal output, at 120 × 32 cells. See the capture method and limits.

Historical Windows GUI captures from 24 October 2026 use a development build with the frame harness enabled. The gallery and provenance identify their source and capture limits; they are not beta artifact verification.

Project

• Beta status and checks
• v1 specification and performance targets
• Architecture decisions
• Report an issue

License: MIT.