An agentic, Rust-fast terminal editor with a modern UI and Neovim mechanics.
Features • Not a distro • Performance • Roadmap • Building
Warning
view is pre-alpha and not usable as a daily editor yet. The engine, the runtime, and the test infrastructure are built; most of the visible feature set is still landing. See the roadmap.
view is a terminal editor that embeds a real Neovim as its engine, so your existing config, plugins, LSP servers, and treesitter setup work on day one: the same Neovim you already run is running them. Around that engine, view draws its own UI in native Rust: one design system for the editor chrome instead of a patchwork of plugins, a process that paints before your config has finished loading, and (coming in a later phase) AI agents as a first-class part of the editor rather than a bolt-on.
- Bring your whole config. Real Neovim is the engine, so compatibility comes from running your setup, not reimplementing it. A differential oracle checks view against a reference Neovim on every build, and a compat suite drives pinned real-world plugin stacks (telescope, lualine, noice, nvim-cmp, treesitter, mini.nvim, and more) through a real pty.
- Fast where you feel it. view paints a usable shell in ~4 ms and first content 1.7 to 5x sooner than bare Neovim, at 3.4 MB resident. Every claim is measured, paired, and regression-gated in CI. See Performance.
- Modern out of the box. The surfaces view owns (statusline, picker, file tree, notifications, command palette) share one design system. Prefer the plugin you already use? It still loads, and a single config key hands the surface back to it.
- Honest about the gaps. The benchmark table below includes the rows where view is currently slower than Neovim, and the build fails if any of them quietly regress further.
A fair question, so here is the direct answer. LazyVim, NvChad, and friends are plugin collections running inside stock Neovim: same process, same render path, same startup. view is a separate Rust program that owns the terminal, embeds Neovim as a headless engine over its UI protocol, and paints every frame itself.
That architecture is why none of view's surfaces can be a repackaged plugin: the render path, input handling, the native UI, and the AI integration are all view's own code. It is also where the speed comes from. A distro waits for your config before it can draw anything; view's shell is on screen in about 4 ms while your config is still loading, and that number is the same whether your setup has zero plugins or forty.
Numbers below are recorded baselines on a Linux dev host, Neovim v0.12.4,
1000 samples per cell, measured paired: view and bare Neovim in the same
run, same host, same config, samples interleaved. Reproduce with
task perf-audit.
| view | bare Neovim | |
|---|---|---|
| Shell painted, config still loading (p99) | 4.1 ms | n/a |
| First paint, cold, no plugins (p99) | 26.5 ms | 131.4 ms |
| First paint, cold, 14-plugin lazy.nvim stack (p99) | 120.5 ms | 199.8 ms |
| Resident memory (PSS) | 3.4 MB | n/a |
| Keystroke to cell change, steady typing (p99) | 0.90 ms | 0.81 ms |
Cold start and memory are big wins. Typing and sustained scrolling are currently a bit slower than bare Neovim (about 17% and 2x, on paths that are sub-millisecond either way, so neither is something you can feel). We are actively closing those gaps rather than explaining them away: profiling already cut the typing overhead roughly in half, and what remains is itemized down to the microsecond.
The full story, including methodology, the per-stage breakdown of a keystroke, and how budgets are enforced in CI, lives in docs/performance.md.
- Embedded engine, RPC seam, input and redraw paths
- Command line, messages, popup menu, tabline, cursor shapes
- Terminal capability tiers (kitty/ghostty class down to 16-color)
- Differential oracle, fuzz harness, compat suite, benchmark matrix
- Native UI (in progress): picker, file tree, statusline, command palette, notifications, theming
- Clipboard provider and full CLI passthrough (
+42,-R,-O,ls | view -) - AI: agent panel, ACP client, context providers, in-editor diff review
- Multigrid,
view doctor, Windows as a supported tier, v0.1
You will need stable Rust, Task, and Neovim
v0.12.4 on your PATH (the engine is pinned; see .engine-pin). Release
builds will eventually bundle Neovim so only the pre-built binary needs
nothing installed.
git clone https://github.com/tj-smith47/view.git
cd view
task build
target/release/view yourfile.rsBest experience on kitty, ghostty, or WezTerm; view degrades gracefully on less capable terminals.
MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.