toast

A lightweight, in-terminal IDE for quick file edits. Toast runs entirely in your terminal with a familiar editor feel: file tree, tabs, syntax highlighting, LSP support, project search, and git status, without the overhead of a full GUI.

⚠️ This project is in early development, you may encounter bugs. ⚠️

Features

• Multi-tab editing with unsaved-changes indicators, mouse-close buttons, and quit confirmation
• Syntax highlighting via tree-sitter (Go, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, CSS, HTML, YAML, Bash, Markdown)
• Managed language servers — Toast offers to install missing servers for Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript, with an extensible config for other languages
• Go to definition — hold Ctrl and hover to underline symbols with a target, then Ctrl-click to jump to the exact definition
• File tree sidebar with git status, ignored-file dimming, create/delete actions, file watching, and draggable resizing
• Project-wide search powered by rg (ripgrep)
• In-file find/replace with next/previous navigation, match-case, and whole-word options
• Go to line overlay
• Markdown preview for .md, .markdown, and .mdx files
• External file watching that silently reloads clean buffers
• Rope-backed buffer with full undo/redo
• Theme system — built-in system (derived from terminal colors at runtime), toast-dark, and toast-light, plus a VSCode theme importer
• Binary file guard to avoid dumping binary content into the editor
• Configurable via ~/.config/toast/config.json

Installation

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install paradise-runner/tap/toast

Download a release

Grab a zip for your platform from the releases page, unzip it, and place the binary on your $PATH:

# example for Apple Silicon
curl -Lo toast.zip https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast/releases/latest/download/toast-darwin-arm64.zip
unzip toast.zip
install -m755 toast-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/toast

Build from source

Requires Go 1.25.2+.

git clone https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast
cd toast
make build
# binary written to bin/toast

Usage

toast               # open current directory
toast path/to/dir   # open a specific directory
toast path/to/file  # open a file (auto-detects git root)
toast new/file.go   # open a new file buffer if the parent directory exists
toast --help
toast --version

rg is required for project search. When a built-in language server is missing, Toast shows an install prompt in the lower-right corner. Managed installs use the language's standard toolchain (go, npm, or rustup) and only run after you accept the prompt. Toast also uses compatible servers already on your $PATH.

Keybindings

Key	Action
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+S / Cmd+S	Save
Ctrl+W / Cmd+W	Close tab
Ctrl+Tab	Next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Previous tab
Ctrl+B	Toggle sidebar
Ctrl+Shift+E	Toggle focus between editor and file tree
Ctrl+Shift+F	Search
Ctrl+F / Cmd+F	Find and replace in the current file
Ctrl+G / Cmd+L	Go to line
Ctrl+Shift+M	Toggle Markdown preview
Ctrl+Z / Cmd+Z	Undo
Ctrl+Y / Ctrl+Shift+Z / Cmd+Y / Cmd+Shift+Z	Redo
Ctrl+Space / Cmd+Space	Trigger completion
Ctrl+Shift+K	Show hover
Ctrl+hover / Ctrl-click	Check for and follow a definition
F12	Go to the definition at the cursor

File-tree create/delete actions are driven from the UI: right-click in the sidebar for file operations, drag the sidebar divider to resize it, use the theme button in the status bar to open the theme picker, and use the breadcrumb Preview button as a mouse shortcut for markdown preview.

Configuration

Toast reads ~/.config/toast/config.json on startup. Missing keys fall back to defaults.

{
  "theme": "toast-dark",
  "editor": {
    "tab_width": 4,
    "auto_indent": true,
    "trim_trailing_whitespace_on_save": true,
    "insert_final_newline_on_save": true
  },
  "sidebar": {
    "visible": true,
    "width": 30,
    "confirm_delete": true,
    "file_icons": {
      "enabled": true,
      "color_mode": "accent"
    }
  },
  "ignored_patterns": [".git", "node_modules", "__pycache__", ".DS_Store"]
}

Omit lsp to use Toast's managed defaults for Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript; set "lsp": {} to disable language servers. Each entry is extension-driven, so other languages can be added without changing Toast. A custom server already installed on $PATH only needs a command and its filename suffixes:

{
  "lsp": {
    "zig": {
      "command": "zls",
      "args": [],
      "extensions": [".zig"]
    }
  }
}

For an opt-in managed custom server, add managed_command (the installed executable path) and an install recipe. Recipes support {install_dir}, {install_root}, {root_dir}, and {home} placeholders:

{
  "lsp": {
    "example": {
      "command": "example-language-server",
      "args": ["--stdio"],
      "extensions": [".example"],
      "managed_command": "{install_dir}/bin/example-language-server",
      "install": {
        "name": "Example Language Server",
        "command": "example-package-manager",
        "args": ["install", "--bin-dir", "{install_dir}/bin", "example-language-server"],
        "env": {}
      }
    }
  }
}

The sidebar file tree uses homemade terminal-style file type markers by default, covering common IDE file types such as Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Rust, Python, Ruby, PHP, JVM languages, Swift, C/C++, C#, shell scripts, JSON/YAML/TOML, SQL, Dockerfiles, images, archives, and build files. sidebar.file_icons.color_mode supports accent (one theme accent), semantic (type-specific colors derived from the active theme), and none (normal sidebar foreground).

The current UI honors the fields above. The config schema also contains editor.word_wrap, editor.show_whitespace, and search.*, but those are not wired into the current UI yet.

Themes

Built-in themes: system, toast-dark, toast-light. Custom themes live in ~/.config/toast/themes/.

Import a VSCode theme:

toast migrate-theme vscode path/to/theme.json
# writes ~/.config/toast/themes/<theme-name>.json

Then set "theme": "<theme-name>" in your config.

Current Limitations

• Project search opens the selected file, but it does not jump to the exact match line/column yet.

Feedback & Issues

Found a bug or have a feature request? We'd love to hear from you! Please open an issue on GitHub with as much detail as possible. Your feedback helps make Toast better.

Development

make build             # compile
make run               # go run ./cmd/toast .
make test              # go test ./...
make test-integration  # run opt-in Ghostty/tmux terminal integration tests
make test-integration-update  # refresh golden screenshots

Integration Tests

The integration test suite launches Toast inside a temporary Ghostty window attached to an isolated tmux server, drives it with tmux send-keys, and writes pane captures plus PNG screenshots to a temporary artifact directory. The captured screenshots are compared against checked-in golden images in integration/testdata/ghostty so the test can catch visual regressions over time.

Requirements:

• macOS
• Ghostty installed at /Applications/Ghostty.app or set TOAST_GHOSTTY_APP to the app path
• tmux
• screencapture

Before running the screenshot tests, enable Ghostty in:

System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen & System Audio Recording

Run the integration tests with:

make test-integration

Refresh the golden screenshots after an intentional visual change with:

make test-integration-update

By default, artifacts are written to a temporary directory and the path is printed in the verbose test output. Set TOAST_TERMINAL_ARTIFACT_DIR to keep artifacts in a specific directory.