textli

A lightweight text editor with focused writing and reading in mind.

textli is a full-window, distraction-free Markdown editor: one warm paper-toned column of text, vim keybindings, and nothing else on screen. ⌘R flips the source into a rendered reading view made for proof-reading and review — navigate with vim motions, leave inline comments, and propose suggestions (track changes) that the author accepts or rejects with a keystroke. Notes about code stay connected to it: a reference like textli/editor.py:2455 is followable — ↵ opens the file read-only at that line, gb comes back — so a design doc reads with its evidence one keystroke away. All annotations are stored inline as CriticMarkup, so they travel with the file and diff cleanly in git — no sidecar files. Pandoc-style TeX math — $…$ inline, $$…$$ display — renders as typeset formulas in the reading view, so scientific notes read like the paper they'll become (and convert to one via pandoc, untouched). A <!-- chart: bar x=… --> marker over a pipe table turns it into a typeset chart on render, while the source stays a plain table everywhere else. And an image reference to a .grafli file — ![](architecture.grafli) — renders inline as the diagram itself when the grafli CLI is installed, degrading quietly to nothing when it isn't.

textli started life as the editor inside grafli, the keyboard-driven diagram tool, and is now its own package — usable standalone or embeddable in any PySide6 application.

Install

uv tool install textli-editor   # or: pipx / pip install textli-editor

The package publishes as textli-editor (plain textli is too close to an existing PyPI name), but everywhere else it's just textli: the command is textli, the import is import textli.

Use

textli notes.md                     # open (created on first save)
textli notes.md#design-decisions    # jump straight to a heading
textli -r review.md                 # start in the reading view

The editor opens ready to type (vim NORMAL mode) and autosaves while you work, and every file resumes where you left it — view mode, caret and scroll included. It also watches the open file, so edits made outside textli (an agent applying your comments, a git checkout) reload in place without a restart. A faint whisper status in the card's corner keeps you oriented — mode, word count, and session delta while writing; the section you're in, progress, minutes left, and open review items while reading. Press F1 inside the editor for the complete key reference, or see the documentation.

The short version

Embed

from textli import ZenMarkdownEditor, InlineVimEditor

ZenMarkdownEditor is the full-window editor (parent it into any widget); InlineVimEditor is a small vim-capable QPlainTextEdit for editing a single piece of text in place. See the embedding guide.

AI agents

textli ships an installable agent skill that teaches AI tools to author Markdown for the reading view and to review through the inline annotation layer — comments from the human, track-change suggestions from the agent — including genre playbooks (decision doc, learning doc, scientific paper; examples/paper.md is a worked example studying textli itself):

textli skill install     # ~/.claude/skills, ~/.agents/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills
textli skill check       # per-tool status: ok / stale / modified / missing
textli skill             # print the whole skill to stdout instead

See the AI agents guide.

Develop

uv venv && uv pip install -e '.[dev]'
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen .venv/bin/pytest -q

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled fonts — JetBrains Mono, Caveat and Literata — are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (JetBrains Mono, Caveat, Literata).