ocode

ocode · read and edit code in your terminal, fast.

Point it at a file or a folder and it opens instantly: syntax-highlighted code, a file tree, mouse and keyboard, a real system clipboard. The whole screen is your code. The only chrome is one status line at the bottom, and even that is drawn without a background so your terminal's own colours and transparency show through.

Install

brew install wstran/tap/ocode

Or build it yourself, which needs Rust 1.85+ (pure-Rust dependencies, no C compiler):

git clone https://github.com/wstran/ocode
cd ocode
cargo install --path .

Usage

ocode               # browse the current directory
ocode src/main.rs   # open a file
ocode ./project     # open a directory (file tree)
ocode --style       # change the colour scheme

What it does

• Fast on big files. Rope buffer, incremental highlighting, and no polling loop: it sits at roughly 0% CPU when you are not typing.
• Mouse and keyboard. Click to place the caret, drag or Shift+click to select, wheel to scroll, click the tree to open files.
• Real selection and clipboard. Select, then Ctrl+C/X/V and paste into any other app.
• Real undo/redo. Word-granular, and it restores the selection with the text. "Unsaved" means the buffer actually differs from disk, not that you touched a key.
• Watches the file. A clean buffer auto-reloads when something else writes the file; with unsaved edits it warns instead of overwriting.
• Images, binaries and metadata. PNG/JPEG/GIF/BMP/WebP render inline in terminals that speak the kitty graphics protocol. Anything else opens as its metadata plus the whole file in hex, never an error.
• 15 themes, 119 languages out of the box, and it only ever recolours your code, never the background.

Keyboard

Ctrl is the command key, because a terminal never delivers Cmd to an application. Hold Shift with any motion to select instead of move.

Key	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z also redoes)
Ctrl+F	Find
Ctrl+B	File tree: show, focus, hide
Ctrl+R	Reload from disk
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Esc	Step back one layer: clear the selection, else hide the tree, else open it to pick another file. Again with nothing left to do quits

Move (add Shift to select)

Move by	macOS	Windows / Linux
Character	← →	← →
Word	⌥ ←/→	Ctrl ←/→
Line	↑ ↓	↑ ↓
Block (to the next blank line)	⌥ ↑/↓	Ctrl ↑/↓
Line start / end	Fn ←/→	Home End
File top / bottom	Ctrl Home Ctrl End	Ctrl Home Ctrl End
One screen	Fn ↑/↓	PageUp PageDown

Edit

Key	Action
any character, or paste	Insert, replacing the selection if there is one
Enter	New line, keeping the current indent
Backspace / Delete	Delete left / right, or the selection
⌥ Delete · Ctrl Backspace	Delete the word behind
⌥ Fn Delete · Ctrl Delete	Delete the word ahead
Ctrl+K	Delete the whole line
Ctrl+/	Comment or uncomment the line, or every line the selection covers
Tab / Shift+Tab	Indent / outdent, the line or the whole selection

Tab and Ctrl+/ both work on a multi-line selection, keep the selection afterwards so you can press again, and undo in one step.

Mouse

Action	Effect
Click	Place the caret
Drag	Select
Shift+click	Extend the selection from the caret to the click
Wheel	Scroll the view, leaving the caret and any selection alone
Wheel in a binary or metadata view	Scroll the inspector
Click a file in the tree	First click selects it, a second click opens it
Click a folder in the tree	Expand or collapse, on the first click

Opening a file with the mouse keeps the tree open, so you can keep browsing. Opening it with Enter gives the editor the full screen. A file needs the second click because opening one is disruptive and a stray click should not do it; a folder does not, because expanding is cheap and reversible.

ocode asks the terminal for shift+click while it runs and hands it back on exit, so your terminal's own shift-selection is untouched everywhere else.

Find

Ctrl+F starts with whatever you had selected as the query. Every occurrence is tinted while the bar is open, Enter jumps to the next one and selects it, so the current match stands out from the rest and Ctrl+C copies exactly what was found. Esc closes the bar and keeps the selection.

File tree

Open it with Enter from the welcome screen, or Ctrl+B from anywhere. ↑/↓ move, →/← expand and collapse, Enter or Space opens, Tab returns to the editor. It re-reads the folder as files appear and disappear.

Styles

A scheme recolours your code; your terminal background is never painted over. 15 are built in (base16-*, Solarized, Dracula, One Dark, and more). Drop a .tmTheme into ~/.config/ocode/themes/ for others. Your pick is saved the first time you launch, and ocode --style reopens the picker.

The chrome follows the theme too: gutter, tree, selection and status text are all derived from the active scheme, so switching themes recolours the whole interface, not just the code.

Languages

119 languages out of the box:

• TypeScript (.ts/.mts/.cts). .tsx and .jsx get a JSX-aware grammar that highlights elements, attributes and embedded expressions. .mjs/.cjs open as JavaScript.
• Schemas, config, infra: Protocol Buffers, GraphQL, TOML, .env, INI, Dockerfile, HCL/Terraform, Nix, Bicep.
• Web3 and ZK: Solidity, Vyper, Yul, Huff, Move, Cairo, Noir, Circom, ZoKrates, Sway, Cadence, Leo, Lean, plus Tact and FunC (TON), Clarity (Stacks), Aiken (Cardano), LIGO (Tezos), Pact (Kadena), TEAL (Algorand), Scilla.
• Mobile and desktop: Swift, Kotlin (.kt/.kts), Dart, F#, PowerShell.
• HDL, asm, wasm: Verilog/SystemVerilog, VHDL, Assembly (NASM and AT&T), WebAssembly text (.wat/.wast).
• Modern systems: Zig, Elixir, Julia.
• Web supersets, mapped to their base grammar: .vue/.svelte/.astro as HTML, .scss/.sass/.less as CSS, .mdx as Markdown.

Add any .sublime-syntax grammar in ~/.config/ocode/syntaxes/.

Images, binaries and metadata

Open a PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP or WebP and it is drawn inline, scaled to fit and centred, through the kitty graphics protocol (Ghostty, Kitty). It stays visible next to the file tree, so you can click through a folder of images.

Press i on an image to see what the file says about itself instead of the picture. Any other binary opens straight into that view: what the format is, then the whole file in hex, scrolled with ↑/↓, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End and the wheel. Only the visible rows are read, so a multi-gigabyte file opens as fast as a small one.

What gets read, all parsed in-tree with no extra dependency:

Format	Reported
PNG	dimensions, bit depth, colour type, interlace, DPI, gamma, palette, transparency, ICC or sRGB, APNG frames, text chunks, and EXIF when present
JPEG	dimensions, precision, components, encoding, density, comment, XMP and ICC presence, Adobe transform, and EXIF: camera, lens, shutter, aperture, ISO, focal length, orientation, dates, GPS
GIF	version, dimensions, colour table, frame count, looping
BMP / WebP	dimensions, bit depth, compression, encoding, alpha and animation flags
MP4 / MOV	duration, dimensions, codecs, track count, creation time, brand, and the tags a camera writes: location, make, model, software, title, recording date
PDF	version, page count, title, author, subject, keywords, producer, creator, dates, linearised, encrypted
ZIP / gzip	entries, directory size, comment, original name, timestamp, originating system
ELF	class, byte order, type, machine, entry point, segments, sections, interpreter
Mach-O	class, architecture, type, load commands, UUID, minimum OS
WebAssembly	version, sections, import and export counts
MP3	ID3 title, artist, album artist, album, year, genre, track, composer, publisher, comment, encoder, plus bit rate, sample rate and channel mode from the audio itself
FLAC	sample rate, channels, bit depth, duration, and the Vorbis comment tags
TrueType / OpenType	family, style, version, tables, units per em, glyph count
SQLite	page size, page count, writer version, text encoding, table count

The location fields are the reason this exists. Photos routinely carry the coordinates where they were taken, and so do videos from a phone, which is worth seeing before you send one on. Timestamps that are stored as an instant are labelled UTC, because a file written at 21:22 in Hanoi holds 14:22 and reads as wrong otherwise; EXIF dates are left as they are, since the format defines them as local camera time with no zone.

Reading never writes, so nothing here can strip a file's metadata the way some viewers do when they re-save. Every parser walks untrusted bytes with checked reads and bounded loops: a truncated or deliberately malformed file shows fewer fields, and there is a test that walks every reader over damaged input to keep it that way.

Changes on disk

ocode watches the open file. If another program writes it, a clean buffer reloads by itself and the reload is undoable. With unsaved edits it refuses to clobber your work: the status bar warns, Ctrl+R takes the version on disk, and a second Ctrl+S keeps yours.

Terminal setup (macOS)

For word motion (⌥ ←/→) and word delete, turn on your terminal's meta key, otherwise ⌥+key just types an accented character:

• Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm: works out of the box
• iTerm2: Settings, Profiles, Keys, Presets, Natural Text Editing
• Terminal.app: Settings, Profiles, Keyboard, Use Option as Meta key

Inline images need a terminal that speaks the kitty graphics protocol (Ghostty, Kitty).

Config

Everything lives in ~/.config/ocode/: the saved theme in config, extra themes in themes/, extra grammars in syntaxes/. The pre-rename location ~/.config/opencode/ is still read, so an existing install keeps its settings.

License

MIT. Bundled themes and grammars are MIT by their authors, see the NOTICE files. Built with ratatui, crossterm, ropey, syntect, arboard and image.