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.

⚠️ This project is in early development, you may encounter bugs. ⚠️

Quick Install

brew install paradise-runner/tap/toast

Features

• 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 — hold Ctrl and hover to underline symbols with a target, then Ctrl-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 by rg (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-in system (derived from terminal colors at runtime), toast-dark, and toast-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

Installation

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:

# example for Apple Silicon
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 your Applications 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

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

Build from source

Requires Go 1.25.2+.

git clone https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast
cd toast
make build
# binary written to bin/toast

Usage

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

Keybindings

All keybindings can be remapped in ~/.config/toast/config.json (see Configuration).

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).

Keybindings

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.

{
  "lsp": {
    "zig": {
      "command": "zls",
      "args": [],
      "extensions": [".zig"]
    }
  }
}

Themes

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
# writes ~/.config/toast/themes/<theme-name>.json

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

Feedback & Issues

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.

Development

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