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macOS · Apple Silicon · Nightly builds
norns is written in Odin and drawn with Dear ImGui on Metal. Tree-sitter, language servers, Git, a real terminal and an optional Vim mode, with the keys and settings you already know from VS Code.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Signed & notarised · Updates itself
Features
Files, commands, symbols and line numbers live behind a single fuzzy-matching box, scored like fzf. Typemvw and find model_view.ts. Every command shows the keys you've bound to it.
A commit graph with lanes and badges, side-by-side diffs with word-level highlights, hunks you can stage from the gutter, conflict resolution and one-click sync. It runs your own git, so hooks, signing and credentials just work.
Powered by libghostty, so vim, htop and lazygit run properly, with true colour, styled underlines and Nerd Font glyphs. Terminals open in your project and come back with your session.
Incremental parsing in the background for 50+ languages, with folding, smart indent and structural selection.
Diagnostics, completion, hover, rename, references and code actions from ols, gopls, rust-analyzer, clangd, pyright and more.
⌘D, ⇧⌘L, column selection and per-cursor paste, exactly where your fingers expect them.
Operators, text objects (tree-sitter ones too), registers, macros, marks and ex commands, with every cursor.
Files are mapped, not read, and only visible lines are laid out. Multi-gigabyte logs open almost at once and stay editable.
Quit, crash or kill -9: tabs, splits, folds, terminals and unsaved edits all come back exactly as you left them.
CommonMark with GitHub tables, task lists and fenced code coloured like the editor. ⇧⌘V flips between source and preview.
Developer ID signed and notarised by Apple. Updates are signed too, and install in place without losing your work.
Speed
No Electron, no web view, no garbage collector. Every hot path in norns has a benchmark and a budget, measured on every push.
Drawn on Metal, every frame
Literal search across a project
To apply a keystroke
Git gutter diff of a 50,000-line file
From the norns benchmark suite on an Apple M4 Pro. Search uses three threads.
Muscle memory
Key bindings, command IDs and setting names follow VS Code's macOS defaults, so most habits and config carry straight over.
Themes
Latte, Frappé, Macchiato and Mocha ship in the box. Add your own with a data-only extension.
Inside
A native app with a small, sharp stack. No runtime to boot, no browser to feed.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later on Apple Silicon. norns is early software: one folder per window, no VoiceOver yet.