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Forge a command once. Call it by name.

The Textsmith is a powerful Linux terminal boosting productivity for anyone who works with text, commands and the shell.

Download The Textsmith Read the manual

Version 1.0.0, 1 November 2026. Free software for Linux, under the GPL.

~
~$ #send: rclone sync <from> drive:Library/<to:<from>> --progress
Alt+M saves the line as a bookmark called send.
~$ send Music
Alt+Enter calls it. The line becomes what will run:
~$ rclone sync Music drive:Library/Music --progress
Transferred:   12 / 12, 100%
~$

An ordinary terminal, with three things added

The Textsmith is built on GTK and VTE, the terminal widget inside GNOME Terminal. Your prompt, your shell, Tab completion, vim and htop all work as they always have. What it adds:

A bookmark is one line

Type the command you already know, as a comment with a name in front, and press Alt+M. Mark the arguments with angle brackets. That is the whole language: no configuration files, no scripts to write.

Your bookmarks live in one plain text file. Carry it in your dotfiles, and one name can run apt on one machine and pacman on another. Or export them as ordinary bash and zsh functions for any other terminal.

The bookmark chapter of the manual

#send: rclone sync <from> drive:Library/<to:<from>> --progress

#send:
The name you call it by.
<from>
A place for an argument.
<to:<from>>
A place with a default: the same as from, unless you give it.
send Music
  runs rclone sync Music drive:Library/Music --progress
send Music Songs
  runs rclone sync Music drive:Library/Songs --progress

What it looks like

The Textsmith's window with a dark background. The bookmark call send Music has become rclone sync Music drive:Library/Music --progress, followed by rclone's transfer summary. Below it, the call burn without arguments is answered with: burn takes 1 to 2 arguments: iso, disk defaults to /dev/sdb; you gave 0.
A bookmark call becomes the command it stands for. A call with a mistake says what was wrong and runs nothing.
The bookmark list: a filter box above a list of bookmarks such as send, burn, install, update and site, each shown with its command.
Alt+Shift+B lists your bookmarks. Type to filter, Enter to run.
The review buffer: each command on its own line in bold blue, starting with a dollar sign, and its output beneath it as plain text.
F4 opens the review buffer: each command on a line of its own, its output under it.

Two editions

The Textsmith is the main edition: a native GTK terminal, written in Rust. Most people should start here.

The Textsmith Electron edition is a different experience of the same idea. The session is a web page: each command is a heading and its output the text under it, read the way you read a page in Firefox. Both editions share the same bookmarks file. Get the Electron edition.

From the same forge

Under the Anvil

The blog: working with text, commands and the shell, and news of The Textsmith.

All posts

Get The Textsmith 1.0.0

One command installs it, from signed repositories for Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Arch:

curl -fsSL https://textsmith.org/install.sh | sh
Download Installation guide