Fresh
A new terminal editor built in Rust
Details
- External ID
- 46135067
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Fresh
- Website domain
- github.io
- Launched
- Dec. 3, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 187
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9408396946564885
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built Fresh to challenge the status quo that terminal editing must require a steep learning curve or endless configuration. My goal was to create a fast, resource-efficient TUI editor with the usability and features of a modern GUI editor (like a command palette, mouse support, and LSP integration).Core Philosophy:- Ease-of-Use: Fundamentally non-modal. Prioritizes standard keybindings and a minimal learning curve.- Efficiency: Uses a lazy-loading piece tree to avoid loading huge files into RAM - reads only what's needed for user interactions. Coded in Rust.- Extensibility: Uses TypeScript (via Deno) for plugins, making it accessible to a large developer base.The Performance Challenge:I focused on resource consumption and speed with large file support as a core feature. I did a quick benchmark loading a 2GB log file with ANSI color codes. Here is the comparison against other popular editors: - Fresh: Load Time: *~600ms* | Memory: *~36 MB* - Neovim: Load Time: ~6.5 seconds | Memory: ~2 GB - Emacs: Load Time: ~10 seconds | Memory: ~2 GB - VS Code: Load Time: ~20 seconds | Memory: OOM Killed (~4.3 GB available) (Only Fresh rendered the ansi colors.)Development process:I embraced Claude Code and made an effort to get good mileage out of it. I gave it strong specific directions, especially in architecture / code structure / UX-sensitive areas. It required constant supervision and re-alignment, especially in the performance critical areas. Added very extensive tests (compared to my normal standards) to keep it aligned as the code grows. Especially, focused on end-to-end testing where I could easily enforce a specific behavior or user flow.Fresh is an open-source project (GPL-2) seeking early adopters. You're welcome to send feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.Website: https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/GitHub Repository: https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- terminal editor built in rust
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Developing a performant terminal text editor in Rust with custom rendering, rope/gap-buffer data structures, mouse event handling, and Language Server Protocol (LSP) client support requires deep systems programming expertise that LLMs cannot reliably generate end-to-end.
What it would actually take: The system requires Rust using crossterm/ratatui or raw terminal escape sequences, a Piece Table or Rope data structure (like ropey) for high-performance text buffers, an asynchronous runtime (Tokio) for non-blocking I/O, and an LSP client implementation adhering to JSON-RPC specs. The hardest parts are sub-millisecond screen redraw optimization, flicker-free terminal rendering, tree-sitter syntax highlighting, and robust cross-platform terminal emulation handling.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Neovim, Kakoune, Helix, Lapce, VS Code
Concerns raised: Slow file opening (~20 seconds), High memory usage (4.7GB RAM), Missing LSP support features like Code Lenses, No LSP-sourced documentation display, GPL licensing creates legal risk for users
Feature requests: Add to cargo binstall for direct binary installation, Support file:line:column syntax in CLI, Add Code Lenses for Run/Debug options, Add F1 key binding for LSP documentation, Reduce Deno dependency
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 222 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 223 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 32 days after the earliest competitor.
- Hurry · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- The Goal is simple, there should be an actual free editor · hn · 2026-07-31 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Ane, a new chord-based terminal code editor with one-shot CLI edits · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- ZedLite · github · 2026-09-23 · 223 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I made a Rust Terminal UI for OpenSnitch, a Linux application firewall · hn · 2025-11-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Optimizing LiteLLM with Rust · hn · 2025-11-18 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- CodeDiff · hn · 2026-09-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- PNANA · hn · 2026-01-28 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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