A modular document editor where text, drafts, drawings, and media live together as cells — and stay on your machine.

Get started · Why Inktile · Inkjet · Commands

Elevator Pitch

Inktile is a modular document editor, where you arrange cells with various content types. It functions as a freeform document canvas enabling more creative layouts and designs, while still retaining the classic document shape for more traditional document work.

Inkjet is Inktile's built-in meta harness: it unifies your installed coding CLIs under one protocol and gives each its own system prompt, tool surface, sandbox, and effect-mediation. It lets those agents write, draw on, and arrange tiles in your projects with no setup necessary.

Features

• A grid document canvas — a document is rows of up to four cells side by side, each cell holding one thing (text, a version set, a drawing, or media), so different kinds of material live together in one inktile
• Notes and writing with rich text, emphasis, underline, strikethrough, alignment, and vertical anchoring — plus checklists, tables, LaTeX math (KaTeX), and markdown-style shortcuts (- , 1. , [] , # , ---)
• Version pages for comparing drafts, tracking progress, and converting a version to plain text
• Vector drawing with pen, highlighter, eraser, undo, clear, and theme-reactive colors
• Media pages that detect supported image, video, and audio files in one action
• Freeform layout with pointer-based ordering, side-by-side grouping, shared row resizing, and column width splits
• A personal library for creating, importing, reopening, renaming, pinning, duplicating, deleting, sorting, and searching inktiles
• Inkjet owns your CLI (desktop app) — it detects the coding-agent CLIs already installed and signed in (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode), spawns them headless, supervises each turn, and sandboxes them to web research and this one document: zero setup, no API keys, no ports, no MCP wiring
• Inkjet edits the open document live — text streams in as it's written; it creates, arranges, and deletes tiles, keeps notes on tile backs, and draws stroke by stroke; and the whole turn reverts with a single Ctrl+Z — how it works
• Portable .inktile archives with a manifest and separate binary assets
• Export from the toolbar as an .inktile archive, a PDF through the system print dialog, or a plain-text .txt that keeps every tile's text, all versions, and notes
• Browser and Windows desktop modes backed by the same React editor

Inkjet, the agent-runner

Inkjet is the agent-runner that lives inside the desktop app — it's the panel drawing the flower in the screenshot above. Open it and Inktile detects the AI CLIs already installed and signed in on your machine (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode). No API keys, no accounts, no configuration: pick a provider, pick a model, start a session, and ask for what you want.

It edits the document you're looking at. Inkjet has full control of the open inktile: it writes and edits text in small chunks that render as they arrive, creates, arranges, and deletes tiles, keeps notes on tile backs, manages version pages, authors drawings stroke by stroke, and adds SVG illustrations or media found while researching on the web.

You stay in charge.

• While a turn runs, the workspace locks read-only with an "Inkjet is printing" indicator and a Stop button.
• The model's reasoning and working notes stream into a temporary "thinking" bubble; only its final answer lands in the transcript.
• An entire turn — however many edits it made — reverts with a single Ctrl+Z. Stop keeps what's already written, still as one undo step.

It's local and contained. The panel talks to a small dependency-free broker the app spawns on demand; the broker drives your own CLI on your existing login and never touches your files. Every change flows through the app's own document mutations, so layout rules, autosave, and history behave exactly as if you had made the edit yourself — and a revision guard forces the agent to re-read whenever you've edited the document since its last look. The providers run with web research only: no shell, no filesystem.

The full mechanics — broker, wire protocol, turn lock, revision guard — are documented in Architecture.

Quick start

Browser development

Requirements: Node.js with npm.

npm install
npm run dev

Vite prints the local development URL in the terminal.

Windows desktop development

Install the Tauri 2 prerequisites and Rust, then run:

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Commands

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Start the Vite development server
npm run build	Type-check and build the production web bundle
npm run check	Run docs, build, archive, broker typecheck, and UI syntax checks
npm run test:archive	Exercise .inktile encode/decode with an asset
npm run test:ui	Run the Chromium interaction smoke suite
npm test	Run build, archive, and live UI smoke coverage
npm run tauri dev	Launch the native desktop shell
npm run check:agent	Typecheck the zero-dependency Inkjet broker
npm run release:desktop	Validate and build Windows release bundles

The UI smoke suite needs Chromium. Set CHROMIUM_PATH when it is not available at the script's default location. The full validation matrix lives in Testing and release.

Under the hood

                    Toolbar · PageStack · PageView
                                  │
                         DocumentContext
                         ╱             ╲
                 document state     runtime assets
                         ╲             ╱
                    archive + file system
                    browser or Tauri shell

DocumentContext is the mutation boundary for document structure. pageRows is the canonical visual arrangement, while pageOrder is its flattened index. Media bytes live in a runtime asset map and are written beside manifest.json inside the .inktile ZIP container.

Area	Responsibility
src/components/	Editor UI and page renderers
src/document/	Persisted types, factories, normalization, and mutations
src/persistence/	ZIP archive, native/browser file IO, export, and recovery autosave
agent/	Zero-dependency Inkjet broker that drives the Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode CLIs
src-tauri/	Native shell, permissions, icons, and bundling
scripts/	Smoke tests, docs checks, hooks, and release automation

.inktile files

Inktile documents are ZIP containers designed to stay legible and portable:

manifest.json
README.txt
assets/<uuid>.<extension>

Documents are intentionally local-first. Cloud synchronization and collaboration are outside the current product boundary.

Project notes

Inktile is an evolving desktop editor, not a finished productivity suite. The interaction and layout contracts are documented in Product invariants. Read Architecture before changing state flow, page layout, dragging, persistence, or drawing behavior.

_{Made for the moment before the idea knows what it is.}