Today The Textsmith 1.0 is out. It is a Linux terminal for anyone who works with text, commands and the shell, and it is free software, under the GNU General Public License.

Why another terminal

I read my screen with Orca. Terminals on Linux mostly work with a screen reader, but rarely well: press Enter and the prompt is read to you again before the output; press Tab and you hear the whole line instead of what was completed; and when a command prints a page of text, the way back to it is Orca’s review keys, line by line, through everything else on the screen.

The Textsmith started as an answer to that, and grew into a terminal I would want even if I could see it.

What it is

At heart it is an ordinary terminal. It is built on GTK and VTE, the same widget as GNOME Terminal, so your prompt, your shell and your programs behave exactly as they always have. On top of that it adds three things.

Bookmarks. Save a command once, with places for its arguments, and run it by name. Type it as a comment and press Alt+M:

#burn: sudo dd if=<iso> of=<disk:/dev/sdb> bs=1M status=progress

From then on, burn arch.iso and Alt+Enter runs it, with /dev/sdb filled in unless you name another disk. A bookmark can take any number of arguments, take a default from another argument, and run a different command on each of your machines, so one update runs apt on one and pacman on another. And if you use other terminals too, textsmith bm export turns your bookmarks into ordinary shell functions.

The review buffer. Press F4 and the whole session is there as text: each command on a line of its own, its output beneath it, failed commands marked. Alt+Up and Alt+Down jump between commands, Alt+PageUp and Alt+PageDown between the ones that failed. Read it, search it, copy from it, and press Escape to go back.

Quiet for screen readers. Enter and Tab no longer read your prompt again. Tab goes through the choices as zsh does and says each one whole. The Textsmith only speaks up itself when a key would otherwise give you no answer.

Two editions

The Textsmith comes in two editions. The main one, described above, is a native GTK terminal written in Rust. The Electron edition is a different experience: the session is a web page, each command a heading with its output beneath it, to read the way you read a page in a browser. They share the same bookmarks, so you can use both.

Getting it

There is a package for Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint, a PKGBUILD for Arch, and the source for everything else, on the download page. The manual covers everything, and F1 opens the same manual from inside The Textsmith.

Companions

Two other projects share the forge. hande is a bookmark manager for the terminal, for web addresses, files and commands alike. narrowText.vim lets you narrow a long file to the part you are working on, in Vim and Neovim.

What next

This is a first release, and you will find things I did not. Tell me about them on the issue tracker. This blog, Under the Anvil, will carry news of The Textsmith and, more often, ways of working with text, commands and the shell.

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