glint

A modeless terminal markdown editor with live styling — a Bubble Tea TUI built for a notes vault. Type in a centered iA-Writer-style writing canvas with soft-wrapping and live markdown coloring, flip to a Glamour read preview, fuzzy-find notes with a live preview pane, and theme it to match your terminal (Flexoki light/dark + charm). Open any file, jump to today's daily note, or start a fresh document from anywhere. Code files open with calm, minimal syntax highlighting (strings, comments, and numbers only) so glint works as a quick $EDITOR too. Prose gets light inline spellcheck — a red curly underline under obvious typos, with one-key suggestions.

Install

brew tap humdrum/tap https://codex.humdrum.me/git/homebrew-tap.git
brew trust humdrum/tap   # Homebrew gates third-party taps
brew install glint

Upgrade later:

brew update && brew upgrade glint

Usage

glint                 # fuzzy picker over the current directory
glint notes.md        # open a file
glint -n [name]       # new note in the current dir (-n -i → inbox, -n -v → vault)
glint -p [file]       # open straight into the read preview (glow-style reader)
glint -e <file>       # export a file to printable house-style HTML and open it
glint -t              # today's daily note
glint -d              # browse the daily-notes folder
glint -v              # fuzzy picker over your vault, from anywhere
glint -i              # fuzzy picker over your inbox
glint -c              # interactive config walkthrough
glint -h              # help: all commands and keys
glint --version       # print version

Every command flag accepts a short letter or the full word, with one or two dashes: -n / --n / -new / --new, -t / --today, -v / --vault, etc.

Keys

Using Cmd+arrows on macOS

Terminals speak ANSI escape sequences, which have no concept of a Cmd (Super) key — a terminal app never sees Cmd+←, only whatever bytes the terminal chose to send for it. glint therefore can't bind Cmd itself; your terminal has to translate. Every key in the table above works out of the box with no config.

To get the macOS muscle memory (Cmd+←/→ for line edges, Cmd+↑/↓ for document edges), map the four sequences glint listens for:

Ghostty — in ~/.config/ghostty/config:

keybind = cmd+left=csi:H
keybind = cmd+right=csi:F
keybind = cmd+up=csi:1;5H
keybind = cmd+down=csi:1;5F

iTerm2 — Settings → Profiles → Keys → Key Mappings, add each as Send Escape Sequence with the text after the ESC ([H, [F, [1;5H, [1;5F).

Apple Terminal — Settings → Profiles → Keyboard → +, same escape sequences.

On a Mac, Ctrl+↑ and Ctrl+↓ never reach any terminal app — macOS claims them for Mission Control (System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control). Use Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End, or the Cmd+↑/Cmd+↓ mapping above.

Unsure what your terminal actually sends? glint --keys prints the key glint decodes for each press — press Cmd+↑ and see whether anything arrives.

Configuration

Run glint -c for an interactive walkthrough that writes the file for you (no hand-editing, daily-format presets instead of raw Go layouts). The settings live in ~/.config/glint/config.toml (all keys optional):

vault_dir     = ""           # the vault `glint -v` opens from anywhere (e.g. "~/Notes"); unset = current dir
inbox_dir     = ""           # where `glint -n -i` / save-as land; "" = working dir, relative = under it
daily_subdir  = "Daily"      # daily notes live in <vault>/<daily_subdir>/ (absolute path used as-is)
daily_format  = "2006-01-02" # Go time layout for daily-note filenames
theme         = "auto"       # auto | flexoki-light | flexoki-dark | charm  (auto detects macOS appearance)
glamour_style = ""           # override the preview style; "" follows the theme
spellcheck    = "auto"       # auto | on | off  (auto = on for prose/notes, off for code files)
grammar       = "auto"       # auto | on | off  (Harper; auto = on when harper-ls is installed)
font_display  = ""           # PDF export heading/cover font stack; "" = Georgia serif
font_body     = ""           # PDF export body font stack; "" = system-ui sans
font_mono     = ""           # PDF export code font stack; "" = ui-monospace

Two roots. Bare glint, glint -n, and -d operate on the working directory — the folder you launched from (or $GLINT_VAULT if set), so glint works in whatever repo you're in. glint -v opens the picker on your configured vault_dir from anywhere — set it to your notes vault to reach it without cd-ing there.

Export (PDF)

Ctrl+E exports the current buffer to a clean, printable document in the Humdrum house style and opens it in your default browser — there you hit Print → Save as PDF. No external converter is required: the export is a single self-contained .html file (the house stylesheet and your rendered Markdown are baked in), written next to the source file (note.md → note.html; an unnamed buffer lands in the temp dir). If the browser can't be opened automatically, glint prints the file path so you can open it yourself — the export still succeeds.

The print layout follows the kit's conventions: a leading # Title becomes a centered cover page, headings start new pages, {.page-break} on a heading forces a break, the page is US Letter with 1in margins, and printing collapses to black-on-white.

The stylesheet (doc.css) is vendored into the binary via go:embed, so a brew install glint on any machine has everything it needs. The kit's licensed display/body/mono faces are not bundled — the export ships portable open/system defaults (Georgia / system-ui / ui-monospace) and lets you point the three font slots at any fonts you have via the font_display / font_body / font_mono config keys above.

Fonts are embedded at export time. Set a custom font and glint finds it in your font directories (~/Library/Fonts, /Library/Fonts), reads the matching faces (regular + bold, roman + italic), and inlines them as base64 @font-face in the exported HTML. This is required because WebKit browsers (Safari, Orion) refuse to render locally-installed user fonts referenced only by name. A font glint can't find on disk falls back to a plain name reference (which still works in Chrome/Firefox), and nothing licensed is ever baked into the binary — it embeds only the fonts you configured and have installed.

To refresh the embedded style after the kit changes, run internal/export/assets/sync.sh.

Themes

Three palettes, every span explicitly colored so text stays readable on light and dark terminals: flexoki-light, flexoki-dark, and charm. auto picks light or dark from the macOS system appearance; Ctrl+T cycles live. The read preview and the whole canvas background follow the active theme.

Spellcheck

Misspelled prose gets a calm red curly underline (undercurl). It's deliberately light — an embedded ~60k common-English dictionary catches obvious typos without the false positives of a heavy morphological checker. Code fences, inline code, URLs, wikilinks, link targets, and frontmatter are never flagged, and recognized code files are skipped entirely (same extension routing as syntax highlighting).

Alt+; (or clicking an underlined word) opens a popup with up to five suggestions ranked by edit distance — pick one with 1–9 to replace in place, a to add the word to your personal dictionary, i to ignore it for the session, t to toggle spellcheck off and on, or g to toggle grammar checking (Alt+; opens a toggle-only popup when no word is flagged). The personal dictionary is a plain, hand-editable file at ~/.config/glint/dict.txt (one word per line). Set spellcheck = off to disable it, or on to force it on.

Grammar (Harper)

Grammar checking is optional and off unless you opt in. glint speaks LSP to Harper's harper-ls in a subprocess, so the build stays pure-Go with no new linked dependency. Install it and glint picks it up automatically:

brew install harper

Grammar issues get a green curly underline, distinct from spellcheck's red. When a word is both misspelled and inside a grammar span, the red spelling underline wins. Diagnostics refresh as you type (debounced) without blocking the UI.

Alt+; on a grammar span (or clicking it) opens the proofing popup with Harper's fixes as the numbered rows — pick one to rewrite the text — plus i Ignore, which hides that hint for the rest of the session. (Harper's own ignore command is a no-op over LSP, so glint keeps the ignore list itself; it resets on the next launch.) Toggle grammar at runtime with g in the same popup, and control it with grammar = auto | on | off (auto = on when harper-ls is on your PATH). With no harper-ls installed, grammar is silently inert and glint behaves exactly as before.

TK markers

The journalism TK placeholder — "to come", the thing you'll fill in later — renders as a bold filled badge so unfinished spots are impossible to miss. TK, tk, or a TKTK run is matched as a whole word, case-insensitive, so real words like catkin, Atkins, and outkast are never touched. Prose only — code files, code spans, URLs, and frontmatter are skipped. Always on, no config.

The curly underline uses the 4:3 SGR underline-style and 58 underline-color codes — supported by Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm, foot, and recent VTE terminals. Terminals without them degrade to a straight underline or none. Inside tmux, enable passthrough so the styles reach the terminal:

set -as terminal-features ',*:usstyle'

License

glint — Copyright (C) 2026 humdrum-tiv.

Free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (or, at your option, any later version). You may use, study, share, and modify it; any distributed derivative — or modified version offered to users over a network — must also be AGPL-licensed with source available. It comes with no warranty. See LICENSE for the full terms.