croft

A VS Code style three pane workspace that runs entirely inside your terminal. Written in Rust, shipped as a single static binary.

Tenets

The non-negotiables behind every decision in croft:

1. Speed is a must. Every feature is weighed against its cost on the hot path before it lands.
2. Low latency is non-negotiable. Keystrokes and clicks register instantly; rendering is coalesced so a noisy shell can never starve input.
3. Local and remote parity always binds. Behaviour on your Mac and on a Linux box over SSH is identical. There is no second-class remote mode.
4. The gap between terminal and GUI stays minimal. croft should look and feel like VS Code, down to the icons and motion.
5. Everything has a shortcut. Every action is reachable from the keyboard, and no menu item ships without an accelerator.
6. Correctness beats workarounds. Bugs are fixed at the root, never papered over with a fallback or a downgrade.
7. One binary, no ceremony. Features are emulated in process rather than bolted on, so there is nothing to wire up after you install.

Layout

Three panes in the VS Code arrangement: an Explorer sidebar on the left, a code editor top right, and a panel bottom right with PROBLEMS, OUTPUT, TERMINAL, CAPTURES, and PORTS tabs. An activity bar down the far left switches the sidebar between Explorer, Search, Source Control, Remote (SSH), Run and Debug, Extensions, and Testing, and holds the theme picker. Every seam drags to resize, and a Customize Layout popup mirrors VS Code's title-bar controls.

The essentials are all there: full LSP editing (completion, hover, go-to-definition, rename, quick fixes, inlay hints) with tree-sitter highlighting, multi-cursor, minimap, git gutter, inline blame, and an optional vim mode; a real terminal with shell integration, splits, triggers, copy mode, and durable command history; Source Control with hunk staging and a commit graph; a Test Explorer; a zero-config task runner; Live Run, which re-runs a Python file as you type and shows every line's values inline; and debugging for Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Rust, C, and C++ over DAP.

See LAYOUT.md for the pane-by-pane reference: every editor, terminal, Source Control, Testing, and status-bar feature, the debugging workflow, and language-server setup.

Requirements

Requirement	Why
macOS, Linux, or Android (Termux)	The PTY layer is POSIX. On Windows, run the Linux build inside WSL2; see WINDOWS.md.
Rust 1.93+ stable and a C compiler	Only to build from source (edition 2024; the tree-sitter grammars compile C). See Install Rust.
A Nerd Font as your terminal font	File and activity-bar icons are Nerd Font glyphs; without one they render as [?] boxes.
A 256 color or truecolor terminal	Terminal.app, iTerm2, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, and Ghostty all qualify.
iTerm2, WezTerm, Ghostty, kitty, or a sixel terminal (optional)	Inline image / PDF / spreadsheet previews. Elsewhere croft shows a metadata header line.
pdftoppm from poppler-utils (optional)	Multi-page PDF preview with clickable links. Without it, page 1 only on macOS via sips.
Node.js + npm (optional)	TypeScript / JavaScript LSP; croft auto-installs the vtsls server on first use.

Per-platform setup (Nerd Font, terminal keybindings, optional dependencies) lives in the platform guides.

Install

brew install vitali87/croft/croft

Homebrew on macOS or Linux installs a prebuilt binary, with no toolchain and no compile. cargo binstall croft-software or a plain curl | tar of the release archive gets the same binary, and cargo install croft-software --locked builds it from source.

See INSTALL.md for every method, upgrading, and verifying a release's signature.

Run

croft opens the current directory, and croft <folder> any other. croft remote <host> runs it on a Linux server over SSH, installing itself there on first connect, and croft devcontainer runs it inside a folder's dev container.

See CLI.md for the commands you will reach for most; croft --help lists them all.

Collaboration

croft attach keeps a session alive after you close the window, and lets other people join it. Add --solo and each participant gets an independent viewport on the same files, live. An AI can take a seat too, either as an MCP guest or as a resident pair-programming navigator croft hosts itself (croft pair), local open-weight models included.

See COLLABORATION.md for the full guide.

Platform setup

croft runs on macOS, Linux, Android, and Windows (via WSL2). The cross-platform basics are above; each platform has a short guide for its Nerd Font, terminal keybindings, and optional dependencies:

• macOS — Nerd Font for Terminal.app, and croft setup-iterm2 / croft setup-ghostty to deliver the Cmd chords that macOS otherwise reserves for menus.
• Linux — Ctrl as the command modifier, Nerd Font and poppler-utils, language servers, and the croft remote <host> cross-compile / provisioning flow.
• Android (Termux) — Ctrl as the command modifier, pkg-based dependencies, the auto-installed activity-bar font, and the built-in on-screen keyboard for touch.
• Windows (WSL2) — run the Linux build inside WSL2, hosted in WezTerm for the full icon/image UI; why native PowerShell / conhost is not supported.

Keybindings

Every action is reachable from the keyboard; press F1 inside croft for the full reference. The complete tables (global, Explorer, Search, editor, vim mode, previews, terminal) live in KEYBINDINGS.md. The command modifier is Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Linux / Android, where Ctrl+K is also the Cmd+K chord leader; the platform guides cover getting Cmd chords through your terminal and the few Linux chords that need Super.

Goal

A complete VS Code replacement in the terminal: the full IDE experience as a single fast Rust binary. Everything VS Code does, croft will do, without leaving the TUI.

Maintainers and developers: see ARCHITECTURE.md for the project layout and internals, and CONTRIBUTING.md for the developer workflow (including keeping target/ from filling your disk).

License

MIT.