view

An agentic, Rust-fast terminal editor with a modern UI and Neovim mechanics.

Install • Features • Performance • Roadmap • Building

Warning

view is pre-alpha and not usable as a daily editor yet. Most of the visible feature set is still landing. See the roadmap.

What is view?

view is a terminal editor written in Rust with a modern, cohesive UI and AI agents as a first-class part of the editor. One design system covers the whole editor, the editor is on screen before your config has finished loading, and an agent panel (<leader>ai) speaks ACP to real agents, with in-editor review of every proposed change. view embeds Neovim as its engine, so your existing config, plugins, LSP servers and treesitter setup run unchanged. See docs/ai.md.

Features

Your config, unchanged. telescope, lualine, noice, nvim-cmp, treesitter, mini.nvim and the rest load on day one. Where a plugin already draws something view also draws, view draws it, and one config key hands it back. Plugin messages show up in view's notifications, and everything holds up over SSH and inside tmux.

One design system. The parts of the screen view draws (picker, file tree, statusline, command palette, notifications, tabline) share one look, themed live from your colorscheme. A single config key hands any one of them back to the plugin you already use: copy view.toml.example to ~/.config/view/view.toml and set picker = false under [native].

Every window in a frame. Each window gets a frame of its own, with a gap between them and your accent colour on the one you are working in. Turn it off with one config key, or let view read your desktop and decide. See docs/tiled-ui.md.

Status in every frame. Each window carries its own status along the bottom of its frame: the mode in the window you are working in, and the branch, diagnostics and cursor position in every window.

Your tabs in the top row. The row names what you have open, with the host when you are editing remotely. Click a name to switch.

The tree and the agent in windows of their own. The file tree and the agent panel can open beside your code as windows of their own, and your buffers make room for them.

Beside your code or floating over it. The tree, the agent panel, the command palette and the notifications each open as a window beside your code or float over it. One key moves all four between the two.

Desktop keys where there is no desktop. Over SSH or on a bare console, view answers a tiling desktop's window keys: move between windows, zoom one, open the tree or the palette. On a desktop that already owns those keys, view keeps to leader keys. See docs/keymaps.md.

Agents in the editor. An agent panel that speaks ACP, an agent that sees the file, selection and diagnostics you are looking at, and every proposed change reviewed as a diff in the file itself.

Remote editing. view --remote host:path edits files on another machine over SSH with the same editor, config and clipboard as at home. What typing over a link feels like is under Performance.

Your work survives a crash. If Neovim hangs or crashes underneath view, it is interrupted or restarted with your buffers restored, and the screen never goes blank.

Fast where you feel it. Launch, keypress and scroll are measured with your config loaded. See Performance.

Everyday details. Looks right in every terminal, from kitty and ghostty down to 16 colors. The config is small: [ui] for the theme, [engine] for your own nvim or NVIM_APPNAME, everything else optional.

Performance

The numbers below were taken beside Neovim v0.12.4 on a shared Linux dev host. dev-linux is the default class of this page.

You open a project. You type view ~/.config and wait for the screen you can start working in. Under a login-shaped plugin config (lazy.nvim, noice and nvim-notify) that screen arrives in 53.9 ms under view against 52.4 ms under Neovim: view 1.5 ms behind. The bar for this moment is level with Neovim, so it is a bar view has not met. view's own tree, tabline and status line are on screen in about 4 ms, drawn while your config is still loading.

You type. You press a key and the character appears. Under that same login-shaped config, view's worst keystroke in a thousand takes 1.40 ms against Neovim's 1.19 ms, and at the median view is 11% behind against a bar of 10%, a second bar missed by 1%. view can also draw the character it expects before Neovim confirms it: under that same config the predicted glyph is on screen in 0.32 ms at that same worst case, beside Neovim's 1.25 ms, and the glyph is corrected the moment Neovim answers. The prediction is for editing over a network, which a separate acceptance leg measures by adding network delay at four levels (scripts/acceptance/remote-rtt.sh).

Scrolling, the picker, what happens when Neovim hangs, memory, and what contributes to each of the numbers above: docs/performance.md. How they are measured: docs/benchmarking.md.

Roadmap

The goal is one terminal binary for anything you can view: a file, another machine's tree, an image, a website, a video.

view brings together ideas from across the open-source community:

• Omarchy and Hyprland: tiling navigation, the window keys view answers over SSH, and one config that propagates everywhere
• qutebrowser: a browser driven by vim motions
• tmux: sessions that outlive a connection
• herdr: a fleet of agents as an attention queue
• Zed's Agent Client Protocol: the protocol an agent plugs into
• kitty: the graphics and keyboard protocols
• mpv: video playback

Next

• Rewind the session. Scrub back through everything you typed and saw, branch from any point, export a clip.
• Key introspector. :View keys: which mapping fired, whose it was, what it displaced.
• Image viewing. Open an image in a pane, or preview one from the picker or the tree. Sharp on terminals that can show pictures, blocky elsewhere.
• Media handoff. view talk.mp4, or a video picked in the tree, hands the terminal to mpv and takes it back on exit.
• view doctor. Which terminal you are in and what it can show, whether tmux is in the way, whether mpv is installed, and a report to paste into an issue.
• Windows. A first-class Windows Terminal experience.
• Panes for anything. An image, a video, another machine's file tree, or a vim-driven web browser, each in a pane beside your code.
• Agent-fleet attention. Agent tabs with status (working, blocked on you, done) as an attention queue inside the editor.
• Detach and reconnect. Drop a remote connection and pick up where you left off, the way tmux does.

Beyond the feature list there is one standing direction: syntax highlighting and LSP UI are drawn by view itself, one piece at a time.

Install

Every release ships a bundle per platform: the view binary and the exact Neovim the release was tested against, together in one archive. Nothing else is needed on the machine. view ships with its own Neovim.

# pick your platform from https://github.com/tj-smith47/view/releases/latest
tar xzf view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
./view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin/bin/view yourfile.rs

Move the whole extracted directory where you keep local software and put its bin/ on your PATH, keeping the directory intact:

view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin/
├── bin/view
└── libexec/view/
    ├── nvim
    └── share/nvim/runtime/

On Windows the archive is a .zip with the same shape (bin\view.exe, libexec\view\nvim.exe).

Verifying a download

Releases are signed with cosign keylessly, and the signing identity is the release workflow itself. Every archive ships a .sig and a .pem beside it, and a view_<version>_checksums.txt covers all of them.

cosign verify-blob \
  --certificate view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz.pem \
  --signature view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz.sig \
  --certificate-identity "https://github.com/tj-smith47/view/.github/workflows/release.yml@refs/tags/v0.1.0" \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com \
  view-v0.1.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz

sha256sum --check --ignore-missing view_0.1.0_checksums.txt

Building from source

You will need stable Rust, Task, and the Neovim version .engine-pin names on your PATH. A source build resolves nvim from your PATH.

git clone https://github.com/tj-smith47/view.git
cd view
task build
target/release/view yourfile.rs

Best experience on kitty, ghostty, or WezTerm; view degrades gracefully on less capable terminals.

License

MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.