Accent

Accent is an opinionated text editor for code, markdown notes, and PDFs with an integrated terminal.

• Edit code with multi-line carets, inline suggestions and syntax highlighting.
• Write notes, use templates, and browse links and tags.
• Read and mark up PDFs; link highlighted passages back to your notes.
• Use split panes, shortcuts, and a command palette to work productively.
• Work with Git history, diff-views, terminal sessions, and on remote hosts over SSH.
• Available on Linux (Gnome) with an Android companion app

Some other cool featurs involve (but are not limited to):

• Focus mode, which fades out everything that is not around the caret
• Persistent terminal sessions; no panic when closing a window with an actively running shell
• Automatic light and dark theme with a solarized option for both
• Presentation mode to show off whatever you're working on
• Early version of a draw.io editor

Accent is open source under GPL-3.0-or-later and still evolving.

Get started

On Linux, install the desktop requirements, then run:

make requirements    # check local dependencies
make pdfium          # optional, for PDFs
make all             # build the GTK app and accent-cli
target/release/accent /path/to/notes

You can also launch target/release/accent without a path and choose a folder in the app. accent --help lists the other launch forms: a file such as a PDF, a remote vault, a terminal. make server builds the static helper remote vaults upload, for x86_64 and aarch64 hosts; it needs cargo-zigbuild and zig.

For Android, install a JDK, the Android SDK and NDK, then build a debug APK:

make android-tools
make apk

The Android app lives in android/ and uses the same Rust core through UniFFI.

Desktop requirements

The desktop build needs Rust ≥ 1.95, a C compiler, pkg-config, and development files for GTK ≥ 4.18, libadwaita ≥ 1.7, GtkSourceView ≥ 5.18, WebKitGTK 6.0, VTE for GTK 4 ≥ 0.78, and libspelling. make requirements reports what is missing and installs nothing. Git, SSH, Merl, and language servers enable their corresponding features.

Package examples for Linux distributions

# openSUSE Tumbleweed
sudo zypper install gcc pkgconf-pkg-config glib2-devel gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel \
  gtksourceview5-devel webkitgtk4-devel vte-devel libspelling-devel git-core openssh-clients curl
# Fedora 43+
sudo dnf install gcc pkgconf-pkg-config glib2-devel gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel \
  gtksourceview5-devel webkitgtk6.0-devel vte291-gtk4-devel libspelling-devel git openssh-clients curl
# Debian testing, Ubuntu 26.04+
sudo apt install build-essential pkgconf libgio-2.0-dev-bin libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev \
  libgtksourceview-5-dev libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev libvte-2.91-gtk4-dev libspelling-1-dev git openssh-client curl
# Arch
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel gtk4 libadwaita gtksourceview5 webkitgtk-6.0 vte4 libspelling \
  git openssh curl

Accent takes cues from Apostrophe, Obsidian, and VSCodium. Icons come from Tabler.