A tailored Tooling
As I mentioned in a previous post AI, The return of Custom Single Use Tools I think AI helps us go back to a toolset tailored to us.
Now, I do not think I can be the only one to have this particular taste so I made a set of tools that fit my day to day and decided to share them.
My daily work happens within macOS so I made these tools for that platform first. I dogfood a lot so I left Claude working in the back and just made a quick review and upgrade after each feature was finished and kept feeding tickets as I bumped into wrinkles.
I took the idea of a core in a solid language and UI on native from GhosTTY and it has worked so far.
macOS UIs are made in SwiftUI+AppKit and Linux on GTK+LibAdwaita, I test those on a VM since my Linux machine is currently in my garage wired to hardware experiments.
I so far made two tools I use regularly and I will make more as I hit more pain points. I let myself be influenced by this post about TUIs and I somehow agree with it but only in the current status quo where UI abstractions can eventually be more than what is expressible on a terminal and where making multiple native UI frontends is cheap in human hours.
The tools
I produce deb, rpm, nix and arch packaging along with signed macOS Apps (I paid a year of that Apple dev account so I better make some sense out of it)
TextChum
TextChum whose code can be found here.
Began as a modern implementation of a TextMate like editor (if it works for you, buy TextMate and support the author, his editor was for years the golden standard of minimalist elegance, I did not manage to reach that level nor I will)
A bit more than an editor but certainly less than an IDE.
The functionality is very tailored to how I like to edit files:
- VSplits are columns, each pane can show one different file or all the same
- HSplits are just splits on that column file.
- LSPs for languages but that is the extent of the IDE-ism.
- Formatters on save.
- Lots of configurable micro behaviors.
- Preview for Markdown (and somehow dignified preview for Hugo Markdown such as this post)
- i18n included for en, fr and es (feel free to add more)
- Ability to split tabs into other windows or “projects” into windows.
chumcommand line so it can be used as$EDITOR- Multiple other micro comforts, feel free to test and give feedback
PRChum
PRChum whose code can be found here.
This is a simpler tool, at the base it is a git pager of sorts.
It gives you a git plugin so you can invoke git prchum to avoid trying to replace the pager and fail at some point.
In principle it allows you to navigate diffs but also to review PRs from a forge (supports mainly GitHub and Forgejo).
It also has a way to use it in a loop with an LLM harness like opencode so one can give and take feedback while working.
Finally there are a few facilities like lists of PRs from those opened previously and an “open PR” screen that accepts forge search queries to be stored.