toe: Thom’s Own Editor#

toe is a modal terminal editor for Go development. toe edits Go projects, not the universe.

toe screenshot

Super Opinionated#

toe is opinionated because it is built for one tight workflow: editing Go projects from a terminal without growing into a general-purpose IDE. It favors modal editing, gopls, TOML config, project-local state, Git diff gutters and a changed-file picker, and a small set of deliberate defaults over plugin sprawl or endless knobs.

  • Modal editing: normal, insert, and selection modes; multi-cursor editing; undo and redo
  • Project navigation: multiple buffers, split views, fuzzy file/buffer pickers, global search, file and diff previews, image panes, binary/hex panes, and an integrated terminal pane
  • Go-focused language tooling: syntax highlighting, language server completion, hover, signature help, formatting, symbols, code actions, rename, go-to navigation, and diagnostics
  • Editor display: soft wrap, rulers, whitespace rendering, indent guides, gutters, configurable cursor shapes, and statusline elements
  • Version control: git diff gutters, changed-hunk navigation and reset, and a changed-file picker with unified diff previews
  • Project state: workspace trust, user/workspace TOML config, EditorConfig, session persistence, external file change detection, and clean-buffer reloads
  • 4 Catppuccin themes: frappe, latte, macchiato, mocha

Scope#

  • Go first. Other language servers are configurable in languages.toml; Go with gopls is the workflow toe is designed and tested around.
  • Version control is Git. Diff gutters, hunk navigation and reset, and the changed-file picker all run against the git binary.
  • Extension. toe is extended through commands, key bindings, and conditional bindings.
  • Terminal capability. Image panes need a terminal that speaks the Kitty graphics protocol; other binary files open as a read-only hex dump. Nerd Font glyphs are on by default and fall back to short ASCII labels.
  • Clipboard. toe uses pbcopy/pbpaste, xclip, xsel, or wl-copy/wl-paste when present, with an OSC 52 fallback so copies reach the clipboard over SSH.

Quick Start#

brew install kode4food/tap/toe   # install
toe path/to/file                 # open a file

Press i to insert text. Escape returns to Normal mode. :wq saves and quits.

→ Getting Started

Acknowledgements#

toe is possible because of excellent terminal UI, parsing, syntax highlighting, and theme projects:

  • The Charm team for Bubble Tea, which gives toe its TUI runtime, input handling, and terminal output
  • The Tree-sitter project for the incremental parsing stack and grammars behind toe’s Tree-sitter highlighting
  • The Chroma project, the pure-Go syntax highlighter toe uses as its highlighting fallback
  • The Catppuccin project for the Latte, Frappe, Macchiato, and Mocha palettes. toe ships only Catppuccin themes because I love them and I don’t care if you don’t ;-)