Glyph is a high-performance, native text editor built in Rust. It uses a custom pixel-buffer rendering engine to deliver a zero-latency editing experience without the overhead of Electron or browser-based UI frameworks.
Powered by tiny-skia and cosmic-text, Glyph renders text directly to a pixel buffer. This ensures consistent performance and sidesteps the layout overhead of standard UI toolkits.
The core data structure is a character-indexed Piece Table providing O(1) inserts and deletes with full Unicode safety. Multi-byte characters and international scripts are handled without data corruption.
Syntax highlighting is driven by Tree-sitter, providing accurate, incremental, scope-aware parsing for Rust and other supported languages.
Project-wide file search is built in and optimized for speed, enabling rapid navigation through large codebases with minimal resource consumption.
- Multi-tab file management
- 100-step undo/redo history
- Tree-sitter syntax highlighting
- Dynamic font selection (Fira Code, JetBrains Mono, Hack, and more)
- Project file tree with automatic root detection
- Project-wide search
- Native OS file dialogs
- Native window management
- Sidebar file tree – browse folders, collapse/expand the sidebar, and save your layout preferences (width and collapse state)
- Persistent settings – font size, font family, word wrap, line numbers, sidebar width, and collapse state are saved automatically.
- Pro themes (Sovereign Night, Temple)
- Session restore: reopen your last set of files automatically on launch
- Additional Pro features in development
Glyph is currently free for all users. A future Pro tier may offer additional features. For now, all themes and session restore are unlocked.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| New Tab | Ctrl + N |
| Close Tab | Ctrl + W |
| Save File | Ctrl + S |
| Open File | Ctrl + O |
| Search Project | Ctrl + F |
| Select All | Ctrl + A |
| Undo | Ctrl + Z |
| Redo | Ctrl + Y |
Download Glyph-x86_64.AppImage from the releases page, make it executable, and run:
chmod +x Glyph-x86_64.AppImage
./Glyph-x86_64.AppImageInstall system dependencies:
sudo apt install build-essential libfontconfig1-dev libx11-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libgles2-mesa-devClone and build:
git clone https://github.com/Freedomwithin/Glyph.git
cd Glyph
cargo build --release
./target/release/glyphSee WINDOWS_BUILD_GUIDE.md for full instructions. In brief: install Rust, Visual Studio Build Tools, and CMake, then run cargo build --release.
Glyph is built for developers who value speed and architectural correctness. The goal is a professional-grade editor that is genuinely fast, genuinely native, and not dependent on a web runtime. Developed by Jonathon Koerner.