justwrite

A distraction-free terminal text editor. Black screen, a centered page, and one line at the foot that tells you where you are.

What is this?

A text editor for writing prose, not code. There are no toolbars, no menus, no line numbers and no frame around the page — just text, centered, never wider than 82 columns because lines longer than that are hard to track back to.

Everything the editor knows about itself lives in a single line at the bottom: the version, the document, and the way into the help. Every action is a keyboard shortcut; you learn them once and they disappear.

It is one static binary with no cgo and no display server, so it runs anywhere you can open a terminal — including a headless writerdeck.

Install

Packages and binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows are on the releases page, for both x86-64 and ARM. Swap amd64 for arm64 below on a Raspberry Pi or an Apple Silicon Mac.

Debian, Ubuntu:

sudo dpkg -i justwrite_*_linux_amd64.deb

Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE:

sudo rpm -i justwrite_*_linux_amd64.rpm

Anywhere else, unpack the archive and put the binary on your $PATH:

tar xzf justwrite_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo install justwrite /usr/local/bin/

With Go, from source:

go install github.com/MawCeron/justwrite@latest

Or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/MawCeron/justwrite
cd justwrite
go build .

To build for a writing device you are not on, such as an ARM writerdeck:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build .

Usage

justwrite              # a new document
justwrite draft.md     # open a file, or start one under that name

Naming a file that does not exist yet is how you start one: the name sticks, and Ctrl+S saves straight to it.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+O	Open file
Ctrl+N	New document
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+T	Stats — words, characters, pages, read time
Ctrl+F	Find. Enter/n next match, Shift+N previous, Tab edits the query again, Esc closes
F1	Help
?	About, from inside the help. Anywhere else it types a ?
Ctrl+←/→	Jump a word left or right
Ctrl+W	Delete the word before the cursor
Shift+arrows	Extend the selection
Page Up/Down	Scroll by page
Shift+Page Up/Down	Extend the selection
Ctrl+Home/End	Jump to the start or end of the document
Ctrl+Shift+Home/End	Extend the selection to the start or end
Tab	Insert 4 spaces
Esc	Close panel / cancel

Undo works in bursts: one Ctrl+Z takes back a word, not a letter.

F1 puts the whole list on screen, and ? from there opens About. ←/→ there cycle the theme, applying and saving it immediately:

Ctrl+T counts what you have written so far. g sets a goal for the session, d for the whole document; either shows as current / goal once set:

Ctrl+F finds text, case-insensitively and wrapping around the document:

In the file dialogs

Shortcut	Action
type	Filter the listing
Ctrl+H	Show hidden and binary files
Ctrl+R	Ten most recently opened files (open dialog only)
Tab	Switch between the listing and the filename field
Enter	Enter a directory, or open the file
Esc	Clear the filter, then the recent list, then close

Ctrl+R swaps the listing for recently opened files, most recent first — useful when a draft and a journal live in folders that are nowhere near each other:

Binary files and dotfiles stay out of the listing by default. Stepping up to the parent leaves the cursor on the directory you came out of.

Anything that would throw away unsaved work — quitting, starting a new document, opening another file, saving over an existing one — asks first.

If the file changed on disk since it was opened — another program, another justwrite, a synced folder — Ctrl+S stops instead of overwriting it, and offers a way out: reload the disk version, overwrite it anyway, or save as a different file.

Themes

Three, cycled with ←/→ from the help panel (F1):

• screen — the default. Pure ANSI (0-15), so it adopts whatever colour scheme the terminal already has rather than imposing one.
• paper — dark ink on an actual light page, not just recoloured text. What makes justwrite usable on an e-ink writerdeck or in direct sunlight.
• mono — grayscale ANSI for a terminal with no truecolor, so nothing gets left to termenv's guesswork.

NO_COLOR wins over all three regardless.

The status bar

Shows	Means
(nothing)	A new document, untouched
*	A new document with changes. There is no name yet, so it does not invent one
draft.md	Saved, and matching what is on disk
draft.md*	Edited since the last save
saved	Written to disk just now
a message in red	The save failed, and why. It stays until one succeeds

Details worth knowing

Saving is atomic. Writes go to a temporary file beside the document and are renamed into place, so an interrupted or failed save leaves the previous draft intact rather than a half-written file.

Unsaved changes survive a crash. Every few seconds, and only while there is something unsaved, justwrite writes a hidden .name.swp file beside the document — the same atomic write a real save uses. A clean save or a clean quit removes it; if it is ever still there and newer than the document the next time it opens, justwrite offers to recover it.

Line endings are preserved. A file that uses CRLF keeps using CRLF; everything else is saved as LF. A file that mixes both is saved as CRLF.

The clipboard travels. Copying works over SSH and inside tmux, with no display server. For tmux, add set -g set-clipboard on. Text pasted in from elsewhere lands as a single undo step.

Colours are optional. NO_COLOR is honoured, and the layout carries the meaning on its own.

Settings live in a config file, not environment variables. The stats panel's session and document goals, and the active theme, are kept at the OS's usual config location (e.g. ~/.config/justwrite/config on Linux) and written only from inside the app — there is nothing to edit by hand.

Reopening a document remembers where you left it. The cursor position for every file justwrite has opened lives in a separate state file next to config, capped at the 50 most recent.

Project structure

justwrite/
├── internal/
│   ├── editor/    the document: buffer, selection, undo, wrapping, files
│   └── ui/        Bubble Tea model, status bar, overlays, file dialogs
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
└── main.go

internal/editor does not import Bubble Tea; it is the document on its own, and most of the tests live there.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CHANGELOG.md for what has actually shipped.

go test ./...   # the whole suite
go vet ./...
go build .

The screens above are generated, not drawn: ./assets/screens.sh renders the editor's real View() output to SVG, so they cannot quietly fall out of date with the interface. Rerun it after any change to the UI. The demo at the top is real too — see assets/tapes/ for how it is recorded.

License

MIT © 2026 Mauricio Cerón