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frext

Fred Text — a super lightweight text editor written in Rust.

frext is a small GUI text editor built on egui/eframe. It aims to be minimal and fast while still offering the conveniences that make a daily driver pleasant: tabs, session persistence, and (as a stretch goal) syntax highlighting.

Features

  • Tabs. Edit multiple buffers in one window.
  • Session persistence. Unsaved work survives quitting and reopening. Every keystroke is written to a per-tab swap file under the platform state directory, so an unsaved buffer is exactly as you left it on the next launch — even after a crash.
  • Catppuccin Mocha theme. The palette is applied directly to egui's visuals, so there is no theme-crate dependency to drift behind egui releases.
  • Bundled coding font with ligatures. frext embeds the CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font (Cascadia Code) and installs it as the editor's monospace face, so coding ligatures (->, =>, !=, …) and a broad glyph set render out of the box, independent of what fonts the host has installed.
  • Emoji. frext discovers a usable system emoji font at startup and slots it into the font fallback chain, so emoji in a file render (monochrome — egui cannot draw colour emoji). Colour-bitmap fonts that egui cannot rasterise are skipped automatically.
  • Native file dialogs for open and save.
  • Open from the command line. frext file.txt opens the file on launch (alongside any restored session). A file that is already open is focused rather than opened twice.
  • Syntax highlighting. Powered by syntect (via egui_extras), with the language auto-detected from the file extension. Untitled or extension-less buffers render as plain text.
  • File-tree sidebar. Launch frext path/to/dir to open a directory in a resizable sidebar. Click a file to open it; the active file is highlighted in the tree. The workspace root and which folders you have expanded persist across sessions.
  • External-change reload. If a file's size changes on disk while it is open, frext reloads it automatically — unless the buffer has unsaved edits, which are never overwritten.

Usage

frext                  # restore the previous session
frext notes.txt a.rs   # open files (added to the restored session)
frext path/to/project  # open a directory in the file-tree sidebar

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+N New tab
Ctrl+O Open file
Ctrl+S Save active tab
Ctrl+W Close tab

Persistence layout

State lives under the platform state directory (on Linux, $XDG_STATE_HOME/frext, typically ~/.local/state/frext):

frext/
  session.json     # tab order, ids, paths, active tab, workspace
  swap/
    <id>.swp       # full text of each tab's buffer

On launch, a tab's swap file is the source of truth for its content, so unsaved edits always win over what is currently on disk.

Building

frext uses a Nix flake for a reproducible dev environment.

nix develop          # enter the dev shell (or use direnv: `direnv allow`)
cargo run            # build and run

Without Nix you will need the usual egui runtime libraries on Linux (libxkbcommon, wayland, libGL) plus pkg-config.

Installing via Nix flake (Home Manager)

Add frext to your flake inputs and import the Home Manager module:

{
  inputs.frext.url = "github:fredsystems/frext";

  # In your Home Manager configuration:
  imports = [ inputs.frext.homeManagerModules.default ];

  programs.frext.enable = true;
}

The package is also exposed as an overlay (frext.overlays.default, adding pkgs.frext) and directly as frext.packages.${system}.frext.

Development

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --all
cargo machete

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

frext bundles the CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. See ATTRIBUTIONS.md for the full attribution and license details.