pad

A nano-class terminal text editor with optional real-time collaboration backed by Etherpad.

Edit files locally like nano, or join any Etherpad pad over the network and see other people's edits land in your terminal as they type.

pad notes.md                              # local file
pad https://pad.example.com/p/standup     # join a remote pad

Status

v0.1.0 — first tagged release. Plans 1 (offline client crate) and 2 (local nano-class editor) are complete; Plan 3 (full real-time collab against pad-dev.etherpad.org) is shippable with the caveats below.

Features

• nano-style keybindings, including canonical alternatives: Ctrl-A / Home, Ctrl-E / End, Ctrl-B/Ctrl-F/Ctrl-P/Ctrl-N for movement; Ctrl-D / Ctrl-H for delete/backspace; Ctrl-\ / Ctrl-| / M-R for replace; Ctrl-W for find; M-G / Ctrl-_ for goto-line; M-< / M-> / Ctrl-Home / Ctrl-End for doc start/end; Ctrl-Y / Ctrl-V / PgUp / PgDn for paging.
• Ctrl-K cut / Ctrl-U uncut / Ctrl-R insert-file / Ctrl-O save / Ctrl-X exit / Ctrl-G help / Ctrl-C cursor-position.
• Multi-line bracketed paste, \r\n / \r line-ending normalization, auto-scroll keeps the caret visible.
• Optional real-time collab when given a https://<etherpad-host>/p/<padId> URL: window title shows <padId> @ <host>, status bar shows the full URL, M-S re-opens the share overlay (URL + QR), M-A toggles author colors.
• Soft-wrap rendering, line numbers via Ctrl-C, on-disk crash recovery via a per-session sidecar (pad --recover).

Real-time collab caveats

• The Etherpad web client's DOM-render path has an upstream bug under rapid remote NEW_CHANGES: bursts of small inserts on a single content line can scramble in the live view (the underlying baseAText is correct; refresh restores order). We work around this by batching outbound changesets with a fixed-cadence 1800ms commit window so receivers never see more than ~0.6 NEW_CHANGES/sec from us. Tradeoff: collaborators see your edits up to ~1.8s later than they would from a peer browser. Tracked at ether/etherpad#7773 and a follow-up PR.
• A second related bug — server-side _handleUserChanges accepting changesets that strand the trailing \n — is patched in the same upstream PR. Until that lands and you're running a patched Etherpad, the pad's setDocAText reconcile path may disconnect a browser if a non-JS client misbehaves. pad itself is defensive enough not to trigger this.

Install

Pre-built binaries (recommended)

Every tagged release ships pre-built binaries for Linux (x64 / arm64, gnu and musl), macOS (x64 / arm64), and Windows (x64 / arm64). Pick whichever's easiest:

Linux / macOS — one-liner

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/ether/pad/releases/latest/download/pad-installer.sh | sh

Windows — PowerShell one-liner

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://github.com/ether/pad/releases/latest/download/pad-installer.ps1 | iex"

Windows — MSI installer

Download pad-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.msi (or the aarch64 variant) from the latest release and double-click.

Debian / Ubuntu — .deb

curl -LO https://github.com/ether/pad/releases/latest/download/pad-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i pad-amd64.deb

Homebrew (macOS / Linux)

brew install ether/pad/pad

Direct archive download

The releases page hosts .tar.xz (Unix) and .zip (Windows) archives for each platform if you'd rather extract by hand. All artifacts ship .sha256 sidecars and a sha256.sum aggregate.

From source (requires cargo)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ether/pad/main/install.sh | sh

That runs cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/ether/pad pad and tells you where the binary landed. The same command works if you'd rather skip the script:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/ether/pad pad

Building from source

cargo build --release -p pad
install -m 755 target/release/pad ~/.local/bin/

Development

cargo test --workspace               # unit + integration
cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings

Bidi (network-touching) tests against a live Etherpad:

PAD_ETHERPAD_BASE=https://pad-dev.etherpad.org \
  cargo test -p pad --test bidi_scenarios -- --test-threads=1 --nocapture

Live-DOM verification via Playwright + a headless Chromium attached to the pad URL lives in /tmp/ep-watcher/ (separate from this repo — see the reference_playwright_browser_watch memory note for the recipe).

Diagnostics

PAD_DIAG_LOG=/tmp/pad-diag.log pad https://pad-dev.etherpad.org/p/<id>

Logs every outbound wire (changeset, baseRev, old_len, net_delta) and every inbound message to the file. Useful for "my edit didn't propagate" / "the browser sees scrambled text" investigations.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.