Fresh terminal editor
Hacker ApprovedRanked 16 of 56 text editors by recommenders
Terminal editor with familiar GUI-style shortcuts, multi-cursor editing and LSP support, needing little learning. Critics note incomplete Windows mouse support and missing features.
Terminal editor with familiar GUI-style shortcuts, multi-cursor editing and LSP support, needing little learning. Critics note incomplete Windows mouse support and missing features.
46 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 37
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 80%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 37 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Intuitive, needs little explanation
“It's well thought, really intuitive so far and I definitively will use it regularly”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “basically everything works intuitively and needs very little explanation”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor)”
Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “I switched from VSCode to Zed” Familiar GUI-style shortcuts work
“Fresh implements more standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+ArrowLeft and Ctrl+ArrowRight to skip to the next and previous word”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “Thanks for this cool project ! I was desperate to find more modern terminal editors with CUA mode.”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “these editors feel more like using GUI editor like sublime text for example. And that's nice.”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “Txt: A fast, keyboard-driven terminal text editor for engineers” - Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “I switched from VSCode to Zed”
- Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “Txt: A fast, keyboard-driven terminal text editor for engineers”
Multi-cursor and LSP work well
“LSP is working but requires polish. Go to definition, completion suggestions, inlay type hints and symbol highlighting are all working”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “The multi-cursor experience is the smoothest I've seen in a terminal based editor.”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” Fast, efficient, easy to install
“It's an above-avg experience; a trivial install process, which isn't a given for OSS.”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “$100 to a Debian Developer who can get Fresh Editor into Trixie” “especially the efficiency and speed (phenomenal!)”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Mouse and Windows support incomplete
“On Windows 11 the mouse only moves to the start of a line, cannot select text at all”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “it only supports mouse input when running in terminal emulator under X”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “Getting it to work properly on native Windows is a gap.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” Missing features and documentation
“It's a great start of course, but even just documenting anything that's clearly still missing would be helpful.”
Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “some are missing compared to what normally works”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” Code quality and binary size concerns
“Incredible, the technical choice got overridden by popularity, leading straight to bloat”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “extract_config_structs in build.rs does not, in fact, do what the comment says.”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” “so many commits authored by `claude` with 100+ lines each”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust” - Comment from 22 May 2026 in “Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines”
- Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Fresh – A new terminal editor built in Rust”
Other text editors people recommend
The four most recommended other text editors, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zed | 700 | 430 | 62% | 13 | 6 mo57 owners | — |
| GNU Emacs | 648 | 207 | 76% | 13 | 20 yrs158 owners | Approved |
| Vim | 513 | 127 | 80% | 13 | 20 yrs55 owners | Approved |
| Visual Studio Code | 485 | 547 | 47% | 12 | 2 yrs13 owners | — |
| Fresh terminal editorThis page | 37 | 9 | 80% | 9 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 68 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“wow amazing work I see in the first minutes of testing”
“these editors feel more like using GUI editor like sublime text for example. And that's nice.”
“those 2 editors which IMO are the best without a hassle to re-learn the shortcuts”
“It's an above-avg experience; a trivial install process, which isn't a given for OSS.”
“That's the ugliest spaghetti i've seen in a long time.”
“your logic and your markup live together in one .tsx file”
“The developer experience with something like Fresh is light years ahead of Python”
“so you can have a mini VSCode-like experience on your phone”
“I like it and it's nicely thought, unfortunately I ran into a few weird issues when pasting code or editing code.”
“Have a look also at this https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh”
“Look at Deno + Fresh which is based on preact. You can do a lot with preact only”
“IT'S AMAZING. gives a real sublime+turbo pascal vibe. All shortcuts work perfectly.”
“main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor)”
“already found it pretty useful for my side projects at home”
“It's a great start of course, but even just documenting anything that's clearly still missing would be helpful.”
“LSP is working but requires polish. Go to definition, completion suggestions, inlay type hints and symbol highlighting are all working”
“it only supports mouse input when running in terminal emulator under X”
“so many commits authored by `claude` with 100+ lines each”
“extract_config_structs in build.rs does not, in fact, do what the comment says.”
“you didn't mind shipping a 400mb executable after all”
“I could quickly tell they know their stuff by analysing the program design”
“especially the efficiency and speed (phenomenal!)”
“Incredible, the technical choice got overridden by popularity, leading straight to bloat”
“I've documented that as well it just isn't the first option listed”
“Getting it to work properly on native Windows is a gap.”
“On Windows 11 the mouse only moves to the start of a line, cannot select text at all”
“Fresh implements more standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+ArrowLeft and Ctrl+ArrowRight to skip to the next and previous word”
“my only nitpick is that when you quit, it tells you that its not gonna save”
“Thank you for running builds on ubuntu 22.04 so it's compatible with it.”
“some are missing compared to what normally works”
“WOW. Going to use this for the rest of the day and kick the tires.”
“The multi-cursor experience is the smoothest I've seen in a terminal based editor.”
“basically everything works intuitively and needs very little explanation”
“In Fresh it's designed into the core and should be more transparent”
“I would for instance be curious on the ANSI routines but hesitate to invest mental energy when the code has limitations on usage.”
“It's well thought, really intuitive so far and I definitively will use it regularly”
“configuring an editor that comes with different plug-in systems in a third programming language is a lot of hassle”
“Great work overall — looking forward to seeing further development!”
“Thanks for this cool project ! I was desperate to find more modern terminal editors with CUA mode.”
“I tried it, I like it a lot, but I did find an issue straight away.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.