Pad is an easy to use terminal code editor for those of us who aren't into vim.

Features

• Runs in the terminal, works great with ghostty
• Responsive, resize the window and it still looks good
• Text editor with code highlighting for the current open file
• If not pointed at a file, opens the current directory, default open file is any README.md that may exist
• Autoclosing of parenthesis, curly braces, brackets, and quotes
• VS Code inspired keyboard shortcuts for fast navigation and editing:
  • ctrl+c: copy text
  • ctrl+v: paste text
  • ctrl+z: undo
  • ctrl+s: save current file
  • ctrl+f: search in current file
  • ctrl+g: go to line
  • ctrl+b: file browser
  • ctrl+o: file search
  • ctrl+q: quit
  • ctrl+shift+f: Fast file content search
• Works with some Apple key combinations, depending on your terminal's handling of them. For example, in ghostty, cmd+s works as expected to save the current file but cmd+c doesn't copy

Install

uv tool install pad

Currently Pad is untested with any other installation method. If it works for your installation method, let me know and I'll add it to this section.

Usage

Once installed, point it at a file:

pad myproject/README.md

Or a directory:

pad myproject/

Special thanks

Many thanks to Stan Ovchinnikov for graciously sharing the "pad" name on PyPI, which was to be a tkinter-based editor. He was kind enough to let me use the name for this project, which is a terminal-based code editor built on textual. If you're interested in how this project might have been built using tkinter, you can check it out here.