# shiki (私記)
> **Personal notes, private log.**
> A TUI note-taking app in Rust — three-pane Yazi-style navigation, notebooks as
> independent git repos, Markdown with frontmatter, inline and external editing,
> real per-note version history, themes, and fast fuzzy search.
[](LICENSE)
[](https://github.com/sazardev/shiki/stargazers)
[](https://github.com/sazardev/shiki/commits/main)
[](https://github.com/sazardev/shiki)
See [IDEA.md](IDEA.md) for the full design spec (keybinding tables, config schema, theme list) and
[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md) for release history.
## Features
- **Three-pane TUI**, Yazi-inspired: modal navigation (`hjkl`/arrows), collapsing Miller-columns
layout, and fully **responsive to terminal size** — wide terminals get the 3-column layout,
narrow/square ones stack panels vertically, very small ones show just the focused panel,
full screen.
- **Notebooks are independent git repos** — plain directories under the hood, each its own repo,
with folders nested to any depth (`nb`-style). Frontmatter is optional on read, so a plain
Markdown file dropped in from elsewhere still shows up.
- **Real per-note version history** (not a separate versioning system): every commit that changed
a specific note, browsable and revertible straight from the TUI.
- **Full git workflow per notebook**: manual sync/push/pull, `auto_sync` (commit + push
automatically every N changes), per-notebook policy overrides, robust HTTPS/SSH auth that
reuses your system's own git credential store, and automatic fallback to the remote's actual
default branch.
- **Six built-in themes** (Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Nord, Solarized, and a terminal-native
default that inherits your terminal's own palette) with a live-preview picker.
- **Config-driven keybindings**, scoped by focus, fully remappable in `config.toml` — nothing
hardcoded except plain navigation.
- **Global fuzzy search** across every notebook, plus in-notebook fuzzy jump.
- **Notebook tree view**, tags panel, daily notes with templates, moving notes between notebooks,
cycling sort order, an optional date column in the notes list.
- **Inline editor** built into the TUI, or your favorite external editor — auto-detected from
`$VISUAL`/`$EDITOR`/the OS default, toggleable on the fly from the footer.
- **Logs modal** recording every status message (so errors don't get lost), with one-key clipboard
copy (OSC 52) for pasting elsewhere.
- **In-TUI self-update** (leader+`U`) — checks GitHub Releases for a newer version, and on
confirmation downloads, verifies, installs, and relaunches into it automatically.
- **`shiki doctor`** — an environment health check that works even with a broken config.
- **CLI commands** alongside the TUI (`new`, `list`, `edit`, `show`, `search`, `daily`, `sync`,
`notebook`, `theme`, `config`, `doctor`) for quick one-off operations without opening the UI.
## Install
Every tagged release (`.github/workflows/release.yml`) publishes prebuilt binaries for Linux,
Windows, and macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon) as a GitHub Release, plus a `SHA256SUMS.txt`. Pick
whichever of these fits your platform:
**Arch Linux (`yay`/`paru`):**
```sh
yay -S shiki-bin # or: paru -S shiki-bin
```
**Windows ([Scoop](https://scoop.sh)):**
```powershell
scoop install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sazardev/shiki/main/packaging/scoop/shiki.json
```
**Prebuilt binary (Linux/Windows/macOS), no package manager:**
Download the archive for your platform from the
[latest release](https://github.com/sazardev/shiki/releases/latest), extract it, and put the
`shiki`/`shiki.exe` binary on your `$PATH`.
**With `cargo`, from [crates.io](https://crates.io/crates/shiki-cli) (any platform with a Rust
toolchain):**
```sh
cargo install shiki-cli
```
Or straight from a clone, if you want to build from a specific branch/commit instead:
```sh
git clone https://github.com/sazardev/shiki
cd shiki
cargo install --path shiki-cli
```
Either way this builds the `shiki` binary in release mode and installs it to `~/.cargo/bin` (make
sure that's on your `$PATH` — `cargo install` will tell you if it isn't). libgit2/OpenSSL are
vendored and built from source (`git2`'s `vendored-libgit2`/`vendored-openssl` features), so
there's no system libgit2/OpenSSL dependency to install separately on any platform.
**Prerequisites (source/cargo install only — prebuilt binaries/AUR/Scoop don't need a Rust
toolchain):**
- A recent stable Rust toolchain (`rustup`).
- `git` on `$PATH` — notebooks are git repos under the hood.
- A [Nerd Font](https://www.nerdfonts.com) in your terminal — the UI uses Nerd Font icons
throughout; without one, icons render as boxes/blanks instead of glyphs.
- Optional: [`gh`](https://cli.github.com) (GitHub CLI) — if you use HTTPS remotes to private
GitHub repos, having `gh` authenticated lets shiki's git credential lookup reuse it automatically.
Run `shiki doctor` after installing (see below) to check all of this in one shot.
## Update
The easiest way, regardless of how you installed: inside the TUI, press leader+`U`. It checks
GitHub Releases in the background, shows "update available" if there's a newer version, and on
confirmation downloads, verifies, installs, and relaunches into it automatically — no terminal
needed.
From the command line instead:
```sh
cargo install shiki-cli # from crates.io — auto-upgrades if a newer version is published
```
```sh
cd shiki # from a source clone
git pull
cargo install --path shiki-cli --force
```
If you installed via `yay`/`paru` or Scoop, prefer their own update command (`yay -Syu`/
`scoop update shiki`) instead of leader+`U` — the package manager owns that file and needs to stay
in sync with what's actually on disk. AUR installs in particular install to `/usr/bin`, which
leader+`U` can't write to without root anyway, so it fails with a permission error there rather
than silently doing something surprising.
## Verify
```sh
shiki --version # confirm the installed version
shiki doctor # environment check: config, data dir, git, editor, terminal, notebooks
```
`shiki doctor` is safe to run any time, including right after install with no config yet —
it reports what's missing rather than erroring out, and works even if a config file exists but
is malformed (a normal `shiki` command would fail outright in that case; `doctor` diagnoses it).
## Quick start
```sh
shiki # launches the TUI — no args
shiki notebook create work # or from the TUI: `a` while NOTEBOOKS is focused
shiki new "My first note" --notebook work
shiki daily # today's daily note
```
Inside the TUI, press `?` for a searchable list of every keybinding (also doubles as a command
palette — type to filter, `Enter` runs the highlighted action). Full keybinding tables, config
schema, and theme list are in [IDEA.md](IDEA.md).
## Development
See [CLAUDE.md](CLAUDE.md) for the crate layout, build/lint commands, and architecture notes.
## License
[MIT](LICENSE)