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Why I built editxr
The terminal became my home again. I spent years living in it — back in the Solaris and Linux days — and lately, with coding agents like Claude Code, OpenCode and Codex, I'm in it more than ever. I think that's a good thing, something I got back.
Markdown is a great format for writing blogs and documentation, but I was never
comfortable writing it in vi or nvim, and I didn't want to reach for a GUI either. You can
always edit plain text, or stare at unrendered **Markdown** tags — but who
actually wants that?
I've always tried to follow the Unix philosophy: a tool that does one thing well. So editxr does one thing — let you edit Markdown, rendered, without leaving the terminal. It renders as you type, the line under your cursor stays raw so you're editing the real file, and you can hand a section to an LLM and review its change as an inline diff before it lands.
There's a tension I'm aware of: "do one thing well" versus where this could go. You could keep building it out — editing HTML, who knows what else. For now I'm keeping it focused.
This is my first open source project — and I've been around since before the internet, so it was about time I gave something back. It belongs to the community now.
Try it — and a star on GitHub helps if it's useful to you.
brew install pixdeo/tap/editxrView on GitHub