This is the manual for The Textsmith 1.0.0. Press F1 in The Textsmith to open the same manual, as one page, without a connection.
The Textsmith is a Linux terminal for anyone who works with text, commands and the shell. It is built on GTK 3 and VTE, the same terminal widget as GNOME Terminal and Terminator, so your prompt, readline, Tab completion and full-screen programs such as vim, htop and mutt behave as they always have.
On top of an ordinary terminal, The Textsmith adds three things:
- Bookmarks. Save a command once, with places for its arguments, and run
it by name:
burn arch.iso,send Music,update. Bookmarks can have default values, take any number of arguments, run a different command on each of your machines, and be exported as ordinary shell functions. - The review buffer. Press F4 and every command of the session is there with its output, as plain text to read, search and copy. Alt+Up and Alt+Down jump from command to command, Alt+PageUp and Alt+PageDown to the ones that failed.
- A quiet terminal for screen readers. The Textsmith was written with Orca from the first line. Enter and Tab do not make Orca read your prompt again; Tab says each completion whole; and the program only speaks up when a key would otherwise give no answer.
It is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3. Copyright 2026 Ishe Chinyoka.
Two editions
The Textsmith (this manual) is the main edition: a native GTK terminal, written in Rust.
The Textsmith Electron edition (textsmith-electron) is a different
experience of the same idea: the session is a web page, each command a
heading and its output the text under it, read as you would read a page in
Firefox. It shares the bookmarks file, so both editions can be used side by
side. Its own README describes its keys.