Show HN: Toast, a beautiful by default in terminal IDE

toast is a beautiful developer environment right in your terminal. vim, nvim, and emacs have you build your editor from scratch, while toast ships with managed LSPs, an integrated file tree, multiple file tabs, and themes out of the box. toast is for the developer who wants to stay in their terminal without spending hours getting it up to snuff.

early development, you may encounter bugs.

⚠️ This project is in⚠️

brew install paradise-runner/tap/toast

• 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, TypeScript, and Markdown (harper), with an extensible config for other languages
• Spell checking — misspelled words in Markdown and plain-text files are underlined in the theme's diagnostic color via harper
• Go to definition — holdCtrl and hover to underline symbols with a target, thenCtrl -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 byrg (ripgrep)
• In-file find/replace with next/previous navigation, match-case, and whole-word options
• Command palette —Ctrl+Shift+P fuzzy search over every action, with keybinding hints, live toggle state, MRU ordering, and a status-bar confirmation flash
• Markdown preview for.md ,.markdown , and.mdx files
• Theme system — built-insystem (derived from terminal colors at runtime),toast-dark , andtoast-light , plus a VSCode theme importer
• Auto-save — dirty files are written to disk after a configurable inactivity delay (default 300 ms), with an optional manual-save mode
• Configurable via~/.config/toast/config.json

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:

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

Standalone macOS app

Experimental: this bundles toast inside a libghostty terminal window and has more bugs than the terminal version. The TUI — Homebrew or the release binary above — is the primary, best-tested way to run toast.

⚠️

Prefer a native app over the terminal? Each release also ships Toast.app — a complete desktop app with its own terminal window (libghostty), native menu bar, and dock icon. No terminal, Homebrew, or Go required.

1. Grab the zip for your Mac from the releases page :toast-app-darwin-arm64.zip for Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4),toast-app-darwin-amd64.zip for Intel.
2. Unzip it and drag Toast.app into yourApplications folder.

curl -LO https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast/releases/latest/download/toast-app-darwin-arm64.zip
unzip toast-app-darwin-arm64.zip
mv Toast.app /Applications/

First launch: the app is not code-signed or notarized yet, so macOS Gatekeeper will block a plain double-click. Right-click Toast.app in Finder and choose Open, then Open again — it launches fine from then on. Or clear the quarantine flag once: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Toast.app

Launch Toast like any app — from Launchpad, Spotlight, or the Finder. It opens on a blank editor where you can pick a folder with the Select Workspace button or the File › Open Folder… menu item. To open a specific file or directory from the command line:

open -a Toast ~/src/foo.go
open -a Toast ~/src/myproject

You can also drop a file or folder onto the app's dock icon. See docs/experimental/libghostty-bundle.md for how the app works and its current limitations.

Build from source

Requires Go 1.25.2+.

git clone https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast
cd toast
make build
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) or download a prebuilt binary (harper), and only run after you accept the prompt. Toast also uses compatible servers already on your $PATH.

All keybindings can be remapped in ~/.config/toast/config.json (see 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,
    "auto_save": "auto",
    "auto_save_delay_ms": 300,
    "bottom_padding": 3
  },
  "sidebar": {
    "visible": true,
    "width": 30,
    "confirm_delete": true,
    "file_icons": {
      "enabled": true,
      "color_mode": "accent"
    }
  },
  "ignored_patterns": [".git", "node_modules", "__pycache__", ".DS_Store"]
}

auto_save selects the save mode: "auto" (default) writes dirty buffers to disk after auto_save_delay_ms milliseconds of inactivity, while "manual" requires an explicit save (ctrl+s / super+s).

All default keybindings can be overridden with the keybindings object. Each action accepts a list of key strings (supports ctrl, alt, shift, super modifiers). An empty list unbinds the action.

{
  "keybindings": {
    "save": ["ctrl+s"],
    "quick_open": ["ctrl+o"],
    "next_tab": ["ctrl+tab"],
    "prev_tab": ["ctrl+shift+tab"],
    "quit": []
  }
}

Available actions: quit, toggle_sidebar, save, new_file, close_tab, undo, redo, next_tab, prev_tab, search, find_replace, quick_open, command_palette, theme_picker, go_to_line, go_to_definition, toggle_focus, markdown_preview, show_hover, trigger_completion.

Omit lsp to use Toast's managed defaults for Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Markdown; set "lsp": {} to disable all language servers. Entries in lsp override the managed default for that language, while unlisted managed languages keep their defaults — so a partial config never loses newly shipped 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}, {home}, and {target} (the platform's Rust target triple, for per-platform prebuilt binaries) 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": {}
      }
    }
  }
}

Alternatively, an install recipe can download a prebuilt binary archive. The archive must contain a single executable file at its root (a wrapping top-level directory is tolerated); it is installed to {install_dir}/bin:

{
  "lsp": {
    "example": {
      "command": "example-language-server",
      "args": ["--stdio"],
      "extensions": [".example"],
      "managed_command": "{install_dir}/bin/example-language-server",
      "install": {
        "name": "Example Language Server",
        "download": {
          "url": "https://github.com/org/example/releases/latest/download/example-ls-{target}.tar.gz"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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

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

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.

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