Kern

Get to the Kern of things. — a calm, complete desktop code editor in the spirit of Zed, but quieter. Warm-graphite (or light) canvas, all-monospace chrome, and a single accent used sparingly.

Built with Tauri 2 (Rust) + React 19 / TypeScript / Vite + Monaco.

First launch greets you with a short tour of the key shortcuts — reopen it anytime from the palette → Help: Tour.

Features

• Zed-style chrome — integrated title bar with custom window controls, nav arrows, a file-path breadcrumb, a minimap, and the file tree docked right.
• 9 themes incl. 2 light (Paper, Frost) — applied to both the CSS chrome and Monaco, switchable instantly. Custom font, size, line-height, tab size.
• Projects + Welcome — save a folder as a named project, reopen instantly from ⌘⇧P. Tabs + session persist across restarts.
• LSP — completion, diagnostics, hover, go-to-definition, find references, rename, format, go-to-symbol (Pyright, tsserver, rust-analyzer, gopls, clangd when on PATH).
• Git (⌘⇧G) — stage/commit/push/pull/fetch, branch switch/create/merge, stash, conflict resolution, side-by-side diff, blame, history, gutter markers.
• Code Runner — configurable per-language run commands + streamed output.
• Integrated terminal (real PTY), split editor panes, global search & replace, snippets, markdown preview, vim mode.
• Settings + Keybindings editor (⌘,) — fully rebindable, persisted; export/import config. Auto-save, format-on-save, problems panel.
• Extensions page (⌘⇧X), multi-window (⌘⇧N), Zen mode, reduced-motion aware.

Install (Linux x86_64)

One-liner — downloads the prebuilt app and adds it to your menu:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlexanderGese/Kern/main/scripts/curl-install.sh | bash

Packages from the latest release:

sudo dpkg -i Kern_*_amd64.deb      # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo rpm  -i Kern-*.x86_64.rpm     # Fedora/RHEL
# or: chmod +x kern-linux-x86_64 && ./kern-linux-x86_64

Cargo:

cargo install kern-code

crates.io can't carry the bundled web frontend, so a cargo install binary ships without it — on first launch Kern downloads the matching frontend from the GitHub release, installs it to its app-data dir, and reloads itself (needs network once). After that it runs offline.

From source (registers it as a desktop app with an icon):

git clone https://github.com/AlexanderGese/Kern && cd Kern
bash scripts/install.sh

Develop

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # launches the desktop app with HMR

Build

pnpm tauri build              # produces a native bundle
pnpm tauri build --debug --no-bundle   # fast standalone debug binary

Note (Linux/WebKitGTK): pnpm tauri dev can occasionally render a blank window on first load — a WebKitGTK bug under Vite's native-ESM dev server (internallyFailedLoadTimerFired). Just reload/relaunch, or run a built binary (pnpm tauri build --debug --no-bundle → src-tauri/target/debug/kern), which serves a single bundle and is unaffected.

Keyboard shortcuts

Language servers (optional)

LSP features light up automatically when the relevant server is installed and on PATH:

Architecture

• React UI — layout, theming, command palette, Monaco, the LSP bridge.
• Rust backend — filesystem (read/write/watch), directory walking, git status via git2, and spawning language servers (bridged stdio ↔ WebSocket).
• Frontend ↔ Rust over Tauri IPC (invoke commands + emit events).

See CODE_EDITOR_SPEC.md for the full design system and build spec.

Notes

• Settings persist on disk via tauri-plugin-store (not localStorage).
• Fonts: JetBrains Mono (SIL OFL), bundled under public/fonts.