justwrite

A distraction-free terminal text editor. Black screen, a centered page, and one line at the foot that tells you where you are.

What is this?

A text editor for writing prose, not code. There are no toolbars, no menus, no line numbers and no frame around the page — just text, centered, never wider than 82 columns because lines longer than that are hard to track back to.

Everything the editor knows about itself lives in a single line at the bottom: the version, the document, and the way into the help. Every action is a keyboard shortcut; you learn them once and they disappear.

It is one static binary with no cgo and no display server, so it runs anywhere you can open a terminal — including a headless writerdeck.

Install

Packages and binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows are on the releases page, for both x86-64 and ARM. Swap amd64 for arm64 below on a Raspberry Pi or an Apple Silicon Mac.

Debian, Ubuntu:

sudo dpkg -i justwrite_*_linux_amd64.deb

Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE:

sudo rpm -i justwrite_*_linux_amd64.rpm

Anywhere else, unpack the archive and put the binary on your $PATH:

tar xzf justwrite_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo install justwrite /usr/local/bin/

With Go, from source:

go install github.com/MawCeron/justwrite@latest

Or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/MawCeron/justwrite
cd justwrite
go build .

To build for a writing device you are not on, such as an ARM writerdeck:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build .

Usage

justwrite              # a new document
justwrite draft.md     # open a file, or start one under that name

Naming a file that does not exist yet is how you start one: the name sticks, and Ctrl+S saves straight to it.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+O	Open file
Ctrl+N	New document
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+T	Stats — words, characters, pages, read time
F1	Help
?	About, from inside the help. Anywhere else it types a ?
Ctrl+←/→	Jump a word left or right
Shift+arrows	Extend the selection
Page Up/Down	Scroll by page
Tab	Insert 4 spaces
Esc	Close panel / cancel

Undo works in bursts: one Ctrl+Z takes back a word, not a letter.

F1 puts the whole list on screen, and ? from there opens About:

Ctrl+T counts what you have written so far:

In the file dialogs

Shortcut	Action
type	Filter the listing
Ctrl+H	Show hidden and binary files
Tab	Switch between the listing and the filename field
Enter	Enter a directory, or open the file
Esc	Clear the filter, then close

Binary files and dotfiles stay out of the listing by default. Stepping up to the parent leaves the cursor on the directory you came out of.

Anything that would throw away unsaved work — quitting, starting a new document, opening another file, saving over an existing one — asks first.

The status bar

Shows	Means
(nothing)	A new document, untouched
*	A new document with changes. There is no name yet, so it does not invent one
draft.md	Saved, and matching what is on disk
draft.md*	Edited since the last save
saved	Written to disk just now
a message in red	The save failed, and why. It stays until one succeeds

Details worth knowing

Saving is atomic. Writes go to a temporary file beside the document and are renamed into place, so an interrupted or failed save leaves the previous draft intact rather than a half-written file.

The clipboard travels. Copying works over SSH and inside tmux, with no display server. For tmux, add set -g set-clipboard on. Text pasted in from elsewhere lands as a single undo step.

Colours are optional. NO_COLOR is honoured, and the layout carries the meaning on its own.

Project structure

justwrite/
├── internal/
│   ├── editor/    the document: buffer, selection, undo, wrapping, files
│   └── ui/        Bubble Tea model, status bar, overlays, file dialogs
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── go.mod
├── go.sum
└── main.go

internal/editor does not import Bubble Tea; it is the document on its own, and most of the tests live there.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

go test ./...   # the whole suite
go vet ./...
go build .

The screens above are generated, not drawn: ./assets/screens.sh renders the editor's real View() output to SVG, so they cannot quietly fall out of date with the interface. Rerun it after any change to the UI.

License

MIT © 2026 Mauricio Cerón