A WYSIWYG Markdown editor for the terminal. AI-assisted, 100% Swift, zero dependencies. macOS & Linux.

It renders Markdown live as you type: headings, lists, tables, and code are styled in place, not in a split preview. You can hand a whole section to an LLM and review its change as an inline diff before it lands. It's a native Swift binary with no dependencies, so it opens instantly and stays fast on large files.

test.md — My document

# Title

This is a **test** with *markdown*.

• Item 1
• Item 2

Demo

Renders as you type. Markdown is styled in place; the line you're on stays raw.

AI section editing. Describe a change and review it as an inline diff.

Themes. Light or dark, from the command palette.

Focus mode. Dim everything but the line — or word — you're on. Ctrl+B.

Rendered or raw. Flip the view with Ctrl+R.

Incremental find. Ctrl+F to search, Ctrl+G to step through matches.

Opens instantly. Even on large files.

Features

• Live Markdown rendering. Headings, emphasis, lists, task lists, tables, blockquotes, code blocks, and YAML frontmatter are styled in place, while the line you're editing stays plain text.
• Multi-file workspace. Open files in tabs (editxr a.md b.md, or Ctrl+O to fuzzy-find any file in the folder tree). Ctrl+N cycles tabs, Ctrl+[ goes back to the previous file, Ctrl+W closes the tab.
• Navigable links. [text](file.md) and Obsidian-style [[wikilinks]] render collapsed to their underlined title and open on Ctrl+] or a click — local files in a tab, http(s)/mailto in the browser. The raw form reveals when the cursor lands on the link, so it stays editable.
• AI section editing. Rewrite the selection or current block with an LLM and review it as a red/green inline diff: y to accept, n to reject. Prompt history recalls with ↑/↓.
• Bring your own model. LM Studio (local), OpenAI, OpenRouter, or an offline mock that needs no backend.
• 12 themes, light or dark. Clay, One Dark Pro, Dracula, GitHub, Monokai, Solarized, Nord, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Mono, and System, chosen from a rounded command palette (Auto follows your terminal background).
• Incremental find. Ctrl+F searches as you type; Ctrl+G steps through matches and wraps.
• HTML export. Render the document to a styled .html and open it (Ctrl+E).
• Syntax highlighting. Code files (JSON, Swift, JS/TS, C-family, …) open token-coloured instead of as Markdown.
• Quiet by design. Command palette (Ctrl+P), word wrap, line numbers, undo/redo, and per-file cursor memory, all out of the way until you want them.

Philosophy

In editxr you see the rendered result directly, without a separate preview pane. The line under your cursor stays raw text you can edit, and everything else is rendered, so you're always editing the real file. For a full render, press Ctrl+E to open the document as HTML in your browser.

The AI works the same way: it suggests a change and you approve it. You pick a section, describe what you want, and get a diff to accept or reject. There's no chat to manage, and nothing is applied behind your back.

It stays local-first: plain Swift, a JSON config you can hand-edit, and an offline mode, so it runs with no account and no network.

Install

One-liner (downloads the prebuilt binary for your platform; falls back to building from source):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pixdeo/editxr/main/install.sh | bash

Homebrew (via the tap):

brew install pixdeo/tap/editxr

Prebuilt binaries are attached to every release:

The Linux binaries are statically linked against musl, so a single download runs on any distro (Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, Fedora, …) with no Swift runtime installed. To build from source instead, pass FROM_SOURCE=1 to the installer.

Build & run

editxr is a Swift Package. On most machines:

swift build -c release
swift run editxr path/to/file.md

A build.sh wrapper is included for environments where the default Xcode SDK fails to compile (it uses the Command Line Tools toolchain):

./build.sh                 # debug build
./build.sh run file.md     # run
./build.sh install         # release build + copy to /usr/local/bin/editxr

Requires macOS 12+ and a Swift 5.9+ toolchain. It also builds and runs on Linux (Swift 6+); there, only the OpenAI OAuth sign-in is unavailable, and the other LLM providers work as usual.

Keybindings

In an AI edit: type an instruction and press Enter; ↑/↓ recall previous prompts; Esc cancels. While reviewing the diff: y / Tab accept, n / Esc reject.

While finding: Ctrl+F opens the find bar and matches update as you type (case-insensitive), jumping to the first match. Ctrl+G (or ↓/→) steps to the next match and wraps; ↑/← steps back. Enter keeps the matches so Ctrl+G keeps working after the bar closes; Esc cancels.

LLM configuration

Open the command palette (Ctrl+P) → LLM settings to pick a provider:

• LM Studio. Talks to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, by default http://localhost:1234.
• OpenAI. Sign in via OAuth (set OPENAI_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID in your environment first).
• OpenRouter. Set your API key and a model (e.g. anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet).
• Mock (offline). A deterministic local transform for trying the edit/review UI with no network.

Settings (theme, appearance, provider, keys) persist to ~/.config/editxr/config.json. Per-file cursor positions are stored in ~/.config/editxr/positions.json.

Roadmap

• Second-brain / multi-file editing. Grow editxr from a single-document editor toward an Obsidian-like workspace, in order of difficulty: (1) tabs for multiple open files ✅; (2) recursive directory scan with a fuzzy quick-switcher (Ctrl+O) ✅; (3) navigable [text](path) and [[wikilinks]] that open in a tab; (4) a sidebar file list (editxr ./folder opens a folder); (5) a live backlinks panel (a link graph re-indexed on save). Prerequisite for the sidebar/panels: extract a render compositor so regions render into their own width and compose horizontally (the ANSI/display-width splicing primitive already exists in spliceVisible), instead of each renderer assuming it owns the full content width.
• Page-wise keyboard selection that survives the terminal. Shift+PageUp/ PageDown selection is wired, but Terminal.app and iTerm2 bind those to their own scrollback by default, so the app never receives them. Add an alternative keybinding for page selection that terminals don't intercept.
• Windows support. editxr is POSIX-only today (termios, ioctl, signals, /dev/tty). Porting it means putting those behind a small platform layer with a Windows console backend (GetConsoleMode / VT processing). If you want to take it on, PORTING_TO_WINDOWS.md maps every blocker to its Windows replacement, with a file:line table and a work checklist.
• Homebrew tap. Publish pixdeo/homebrew-tap with the formula so brew install pixdeo/tap/editxr works.
• Inline image rendering. Draw Markdown images (![alt](pic.png)) directly in the editor using terminal graphics protocols (iTerm2 inline images / Kitty graphics / Sixel), with a block-character fallback for terminals without support. Needs terminal-capability detection, image decoding (via the OS image APIs, no extra deps), and reserving / clearing the image's cell rectangle as the view scrolls. (Video isn't a terminal protocol; it would be frame-by-frame image playback, and animated GIFs already animate in iTerm2.)

License

MIT © 2026 Pixdeo LTD. See LICENSE.