alxedit2

A personal IDE-style TUI file editor, built with Textual.

• File explorer for the working directory on the left (20% of the screen)
• Tabbed editor on the rest of the screen
• Syntax highlighting via tree-sitter grammars (see below)
• Mouse-friendly: click files to open them, click folders to expand them, click tabs to switch, wheel to scroll

Installation

Development (in this repo):

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/alxedit2

Global install (so alxedit2 is on your PATH in any directory):

pipx install /home/alex/devel/alxedit2     # isolated env, recommended
# — or —
pip install /home/alex/devel/alxedit2      # into the active environment

After pipx, just run alxedit2 from anywhere.

Usage

alxedit2 [PATHS…] [--root DIR]

• PATHS — files to open, and/or a directory to use as the working directory (the first directory given becomes the working directory).
• --root DIR — set the working directory explicitly (wins over any directory passed in PATHS).
• If no directory is given, the working directory is the current one (pwd).

The working directory is what the left-hand file explorer is rooted at, and it is shown at the bottom-left of the status bar.

Examples

alxedit2                        # open the current directory
alxedit2 ~/src/myproject        # open a project directory
alxedit2 ~/src/myproject/main.py   # open a file (working dir = pwd)
alxedit2 --root ~/src/myproject main.py   # explicit working dir + a file

Keys

Key	Action
ctrl+n	New buffer
ctrl+s	Save (save-as if untitled)
ctrl+shift+s	Save as…
f4 / ctrl+w	Close tab
ctrl+q	Quit
f1	Help

Syntax highlighting

Highlighting uses Textual's built-in tree-sitter grammars (installed by textual[syntax]). Supported extensions:

• Python — .py, .pyi
• Rust — .rs
• Bash — .sh, .bash, .zsh
• JavaScript / TypeScript — .js, .cjs, .mjs, .jsx, .ts, .tsx (TypeScript is highlighted with the JavaScript grammar — a close approximation, since no TS grammar ships with Textual)
• JSON — .json
• TOML — .toml
• YAML — .yaml, .yml
• Markdown — .md, .markdown
• Go — .go
• Java — .java
• SQL — .sql
• HTML — .html, .htm
• CSS — .css
• XML — .xml

Anything else opens as plain text.

Development

.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest