cove-editor

README

Cove

A terminal IDE you can use in five minutes: no tutorial, no muscle-memory tax.

Cove is a GUI-native terminal editor written in Go. If you come from VS Code, Zed, or JetBrains, everything works the way you expect: visible menus and tabs, a command palette, familiar shortcuts (Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+P opens the palette), and first-class mouse support. The differentiator is discoverability, not a feature list.

Features

• Fast on big files: rope buffer + virtualized viewport; keystroke-to-render under one frame on a 50k-line file (enforced by CI perf gates).
• Tree-sitter syntax highlighting for fourteen languages plus the config files around them (.env, .gitignore, go.mod, lockfiles, shell dotfiles, …), with structural selection (Ctrl+E expands the selection to the enclosing syntax node) and embedded-language support: <script>/<style> in HTML and fenced code blocks in Markdown highlight as the real thing.
• LSP built in: diagnostics, go-to-definition (F12), references (Shift+F12), hover docs (Ctrl+K), rename (F2), completion (Ctrl+Space), formatting, quick fixes and refactors (Alt+Enter — including server commands that create files, like gopls's add test and extract to new file), a symbol outline (Ctrl+T), project-wide symbol search (F3), and a problems list (F8). Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Rust, HTML, CSS, and Terraform work out of the box — including TypeScript 7's native language server (both the push and pull diagnostics models are supported).
• Search across the project (F7): .gitignore-aware, smart-case, sees unsaved buffer content, and every hit lands in a filterable picker. Replace in Project… (palette) previews the count and applies undoably to open files.
• A jump list: Alt+Left walks back through go-to-definition, symbol, and search jumps; Alt+Right walks forward. Navigation is never a one-way door.
• Sessions restore themselves: quit and reopen the same directory — tabs, cursors, the split, and sidebar width come back. Opening an explicit file skips it (cove main.go means exactly that).
• Command palette (Ctrl+P): every action is discoverable and shows its keybinding and rebindable ID.
• File tree, tabs, fuzzy file finder (Ctrl+O): the chrome you expect from a GUI editor. The tree shows git status at a glance — new, modified, and conflicted files are tinted, folders containing changes get a dot — and can create, rename, and delete files in place.
• Split panes (Ctrl+\): one vertical split with a draggable divider; both panes share the tab list, F6/Shift+F6 cycles through panels.
• Mouse support that actually works: click to place the cursor, click tabs and tree entries, drag to select, drag the split divider and panel heights.
• Integrated terminal (Ctrl+J): your shell in a panel under the editor, with scrollback (mouse wheel or Shift+PgUp/PgDn), multiple instances (the + button), and a draggable height. Register your favorite TUI apps (lazygit, redis-tui, btop, …) in the config and they get their own palette entry and optional keybinding, running as a named panel instance — invoking again refocuses the running app instead of starting a second one.
• Git built in (Ctrl+G): a Zed-style panel with staged/unstaged files, per-file diffs in a read-only tab, commit, undo last commit (keeps changes staged), push/pull/fetch (a branch with no upstream is published automatically), and per-file discard/restore. Multi-repo folders just work: open a directory containing several checkouts and the panel shows one section per repo, with every action targeting the repo under the cursor (or the active file's). Commit history opens in a fuzzy picker; Enter on any commit opens its full diff. Gutter signs mark added/modified/deleted lines as you type, inline blame (Git: Toggle Inline Blame in the palette) shows who last touched the cursor line, and the current branch and ahead/behind counts live in the status bar.
• A commit graph you can actually read: one row per commit, box-drawing lanes colored per branch, and each branch's name written vertically above its own column — with a line running down to its tip, even when that tip sits deep in history. Enter on a row opens the commit's diff.
• Branch switching that knows your remote: the picker (b) fetches first and lists remote branches alongside local ones — selecting origin/foo checks it out as a local tracking branch. Creating a branch whose name already exists on the remote checks that one out instead of forking an unrelated copy.
• Merge conflicts resolved in the editor: a conflicting pull highlights each <<<<<<< block — ours green, theirs blue — and the palette's Merge: Accept Ours / Theirs / Both resolves the block under the cursor as an undoable edit. Whole-file o/t shortcuts live in the panel's Conflicts section, a "Merging" banner tracks the in-progress merge, and c concludes it with git's prepared message prefilled.
• Multi-cursor editing, find & replace, undo/redo — plus the line-editing staples: toggle comment (Ctrl+_), move line up/down (Alt+Shift+Up/Down), duplicate/delete line, indent/outdent, select all occurrences, and go to line (Ctrl+L).
• Plays nice with the outside world: files edited outside Cove reload in place (undoable); a buffer with unsaved changes warns instead. The file tree and git status re-sync whenever the terminal regains focus, so changes from another shell or editor show up on their own.
• No terminal traps: Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+Z undoes. An opt-in Vim keymap exists; it is never the default.

Install

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

brew install GurYN/tap/cove

The formula builds from source on your machine (tree-sitter uses CGo, so there are no prebuilt bottles yet); Homebrew pulls in the Go toolchain as a build dependency automatically.

Windows

Use WSL and install with Homebrew (or a Linux release binary) inside it. There is no native Windows build — the integrated terminal relies on Unix PTYs.

From a release or from source

Download a binary from the releases page, or build from source (Go 1.26+ and a C compiler required; tree-sitter uses CGo):

git clone https://github.com/GurYN/cove-editor.git
cd cove-editor
go build -o cove ./cmd/cove

Then open a file or a directory:

cove main.go
cove .

Language support

Syntax highlighting ships in the binary for Go (including go.mod), Python, TypeScript/JavaScript (including JSX/TSX), Rust, HTML (also .svg/.xml), CSS, Bash, JSON, TOML, YAML (including Docker Compose files), HCL/Terraform (.tf, .tfvars, .hcl), Dockerfile (Dockerfile, Dockerfile.*, Containerfile, *.dockerfile), and Markdown (also .mdx). HTML highlights embedded <script> and <style> blocks; Markdown highlights bold/italic/links/code spans and fenced code blocks in their own language (```go, ```js, …).

Everyday config files color too, reusing those grammars: .env (and .env.*), .gitignore/.dockerignore/.gitattributes, shell dotfiles (.bashrc, .zshrc, …), INI-style files (.ini, .cfg, .properties, .editorconfig, .gitconfig, .npmrc), lockfiles and manifests (Cargo.lock, Pipfile, uv.lock, poetry.lock, Procfile), and Makefile/Justfile.

Language intelligence needs the language's server on your PATH:

Language	Server	Install
Go	gopls	go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest
Python	pyright-langserver	npm i -g pyright
TypeScript / JavaScript	tsc --lsp (TypeScript 7+)	npm i -g typescript
Rust	rust-analyzer	rustup component add rust-analyzer
HTML / CSS	vscode-html-language-server / vscode-css-language-server	npm i -g vscode-langservers-extracted
Terraform	terraform-ls	brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform-ls

Still on TypeScript 5? Nothing to configure: Cove probes your tsc version once and falls back to typescript-language-server (npm i -g typescript-language-server typescript@5) when tsc predates the native server. A [lsp.typescript] entry in the config file overrides the probe entirely.

Any other language server speaking stdio registers in the config file:

[lsp.zig]
command = ["zls"]
extensions = ["zig"]

No server installed? Cove still works as a fast editor with syntax highlighting.

Key bindings

Everything below is also in the command palette (Ctrl+P), which shows the current binding next to each action.

Key	Action
Ctrl+P	Command palette
Ctrl+O	Go to file (fuzzy finder)
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+F / Ctrl+R	Find / find & replace
F7	Search in project
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+B	Toggle sidebar
Ctrl+G	Toggle git panel
Ctrl+J	Toggle terminal panel
Ctrl+W	Close tab
Ctrl+PgUp / Ctrl+PgDn	Previous / next tab
Ctrl+\	Split pane
F6 / Shift+F6	Next / previous panel
Ctrl+E	Expand selection to syntax node
Ctrl+D	Add next occurrence to selection
Alt+Up / Alt+Down	Add cursor above / below
Alt+Shift+Up / Alt+Shift+Down	Move line up / down
Ctrl+_	Toggle line comment
Ctrl+L	Go to line
F12 / Shift+F12	Go to definition / references
Ctrl+K	Hover documentation
Ctrl+Space	Trigger completion
Ctrl+T	Go to symbol (outline)
F3	Go to symbol in project
Alt+Enter	Quick fix / code action
F2	Rename symbol
F8	Problems list
Alt+Left / Alt+Right	Jump back / forward
Ctrl+Q	Quit (asks for confirmation; warns about unsaved files)

Every action has a stable ID (shown in the palette footer) and can be rebound in the config file. File: Save All, Edit: Duplicate Line, Edit: Delete Line, and more live in the palette without a default binding.

When the terminal panel has focus, every key goes to your shell except the ones that keep Cove reachable: Ctrl+J (hide panel), Ctrl+P/F1 (palette), Ctrl+B (sidebar), Ctrl+G (git panel), F6/Shift+F6 (cycle panels), Ctrl+Q (quit), and Shift+PgUp/PgDn (scrollback). Rebinding any of these moves the exception with it. (tmux inside Cove: rebind sidebar.toggle to free up Ctrl+B for the tmux prefix.)

Shift+Enter in the terminal panel (Claude Code and other TUI apps): if your terminal is configured to send a newline (\n) for Shift+Enter, that byte is indistinguishable from Ctrl+J — so it toggles the panel instead of reaching your app. Configure it to send \x1b\r (ESC + CR) instead, which TUI apps read as the same "insert newline" chord. In Ghostty: keybind = shift+enter=text:\x1b\r. The same applies to any terminal with a custom Shift+Enter → \n mapping (iTerm2, WezTerm, Alacritty, …).

Ctrl+B and Ctrl+G are tri-state: they open and focus their panel, refocus it if it's open but unfocused, and close it when it already has focus.

In the file tree: n new file, N new folder, r rename, x delete (with confirm).

Git panel

Inside the panel (all of this is also in the palette):

Key	Action
Space	Stage / unstage the selected file
Enter	Open the file's diff (read-only tab)
c	Commit staged files
z	Undo last commit (keeps changes staged, with confirm)
l	Commit history (fuzzy picker; Enter opens the commit's diff)
g	Commit graph (read-only tab; Enter on a line opens that commit's diff)
b	Switch branch (fetches first; remote branches check out as tracking)
a / u	Stage all / unstage all
o / t	Resolve the selected conflict: keep ours / keep theirs (whole file)
x	Discard the file's changes (with confirm)
f	Fetch
r	Refresh status
Esc	Back to the editor

Mouse: clicking a file's status letter toggles staging; clicking its name opens the diff. Push, pull, fetch, and New Branch… are in the palette.

With several repos in the opened folder, each renders as its own bold name · branch section and every panel action applies to the section under the cursor — the commit prompt names its target (Commit to sources (main):), and toasts are prefixed with the repo name. Actions run from the palette follow the active file's repo; for a file outside every repo, a one-shot picker asks. The status bar shows the current repo as ⎇ name:branch.

Outside the panel, gutter signs next to the line numbers mark added, modified, and deleted lines as you type. Git: Toggle Inline Blame (palette) shows the last commit for the cursor line in the status bar: author, age, and summary; lines you have edited show uncommitted changes.

Merge conflicts. A pull that conflicts stops mid-merge (Cove pulls with merge semantics when you haven't configured pull.rebase): conflicted files appear in a Conflicts section, the status bar shows (merging), and Enter on a conflicted file opens it at the first block with both sides highlighted (ours green, theirs blue — merge.ours/merge.theirs in [colors] to retheme). Resolve per block from the palette — Merge: Accept Ours / Theirs / Both, Merge: Next Conflict — or edit the markers by hand; every accept is a normal undoable edit. Stage the file (Space) when done, then c commits and concludes the merge (the message is prefilled from git). o/t in the panel take one side for the whole file.

Configuration

TOML at ~/.config/cove/config.toml (or point COVE_CONFIG elsewhere). Open it from inside Cove via the palette: Open Settings.

theme = "cove-dark"   # or "cove-light"
keymap = "default"    # or "vim" (opt-in)

[editor]
confirm_quit = true   # false: Ctrl+Q quits without asking

[files]
hidden = [".DS_Store", "*.pyc"]   # hide from the file tree (git panel still shows them)

[keys]
"file.save" = "ctrl+shift+s"   # rebind any action by its ID

[lsp.go]
command = ["gopls"]            # override or add language servers

[colors]
"git.added" = "#98c379"        # override any theme color, incl. git states

[apps.lazygit]                 # favorite TUI apps: palette entry "App: lazygit",
command = ["lazygit"]          # runs as a named terminal-panel instance
key = "ctrl+alt+g"             # optional

Config mistakes don't fail silently: a binding that collides with an existing shortcut, a key terminals can't deliver (ctrl+i arrives as Tab), or an unknown action ID shows up in a toast at startup.

Status

In active development, pre-1.0. The v1 scope is deliberately tight: editing, chrome, LSP for four languages, an integrated terminal, git integration (panel, staging, diffs, commit, undo-commit, history & visual graph, push/pull, remote-aware branch switching, in-editor conflict resolution, restore, gutter signs, inline blame, file-tree markers, multi-repo folders), split panes, project-wide search & replace, code actions, a jump list, per-workspace session restore, and user-defined TUI app launchers — all built and recently hardened by a full bug-hunt pass (UTF-8-safe cursor movement, LSP process lifecycle, tree-sitter memory management, non-ASCII git filenames). Plugins and debugging are deferred to v2.

Contributing

go test ./...                      # full suite
go test ./internal/... -bench .    # benchmarks

The performance gates (TestKeystrokeLatency50k, TestKeystrokeLatencyWithSyntax) are hard limits (p99 keystroke→frame < 16ms) and run in CI.

License

MIT