remziduzagac/slipbox

slipbox

The terminal companion for coding agents.

Read, review and edit what your agent writes. Markdown and code are rendered cleanly, the editor is necessary and sufficient, and agent integration is built in.

slipbox sits beside Claude Code, Codex, or any agent that runs shell commands. Follow an idea from the first plan to the code that implements it. Read comfortably, review what changed, and make edits of your own. Tables fit the window, and code is highlighted. Pictures, diagrams and maths sit alongside your writing. Themes, keys and settings make the workspace yours.

Editing is intuitive yet innovative. The lens opens the Markdown around your cursor for editing, while the rest stays rendered. Stay where you were reading, keep the surrounding document in view, and focus on the change.

The editor is necessary and sufficient. It has the everyday editing tools, from selections, undo and find-and-replace to completion, language servers, linters and spelling. Your own editor is a key away whenever you want more.

Use the arrow keys and the shortcuts you know from other editors, or vim’s keys, and discover the rest as you go. space opens a menu of actions, ? shows every key, and : opens the command palette. Everything is clickable too.

The agent works on the same files, through slipbox’s command line and bundled skill. It searches, follows links and makes changes. Its writes are guarded: they refuse to replace a file changed since the agent read it. What the agent saves appears at once. If a file changes while you have unsaved edits, slipbox asks what to keep.

Gather references and excerpts in the scratch, each with its file path and line numbers. Build your next prompt while keeping your document focused.

Review what the agent changed, in git. A note’s diff shows each paragraph before and after, with the words that changed marked, and a code file’s sits side by side. Keep, revert or send back each change, one at a time. Settle a merge’s conflicts on a merge screen, and see which links a merge would break before you make it.

Open the folder you already have: a repository, an Obsidian vault, a zk notebook or an ordinary folder. Opening it writes nothing there. Your notes and code stay in their files, alongside the tools you already use.

• Start here: get slipbox on your machine with Installing slipbox. Then the Quick start takes two minutes. The documentation is a website, with search: .
• Status: every phase on the roadmap is built: reading, editing, search, vaults and named folders, git with its review and merge screen, language servers and linters, and export. Releases are published, with previews of the next one between them. slipbox is before 1.0. Versions says what may still change.
• Help: the documentation, and its troubleshooting chapter for the usual problems. Questions and ideas go in Discussions. A bug goes in an issue. A security problem goes privately, as SECURITY.md says, never in an issue.
• Contributing: anyone may open an issue. Pull requests come from collaborators. MAINTAINING.md says how slipbox is maintained.

Install

On macOS and Linux (and Windows through WSL), one line installs slipbox, with nothing else needed:

curl -fsSL https://remziduzagac.github.io/slipbox/install.sh | sh                   # the latest release
curl -fsSL https://remziduzagac.github.io/slipbox/install.sh | sh -s -- --preview   # the newest preview

The first line installs the latest release. The second installs the newest preview, a build of what the next release will hold.

slipbox upgrade keeps it current. slipbox channel says whether it follows previews, and changes that.

With Homebrew, from 0.3.0 on, run brew install remziduzagac/tap/slipbox.

Installing slipbox has the rest: previews, Windows through WSL, upgrading and removing it, and running it from source.

Try it

Open a folder you already have, your notes or a repository your agent works in:

slipbox ~/notes

A reading cursor moves with the arrow keys and the usual editor shortcuts, or with vim’s keys. space opens a menu of everything else, and ? lists every key. These are the keys to start with:

Everything is clickable too.

The lens shows the Markdown around the cursor between two rules, with the rest left rendered. The vim commands work (dw, ciw, p, u, .), and autosave saves after a pause. When you quit, slipbox remembers where you were. The lens shows it with pictures and examples.

Keys you already know lists the shortcuts from other editors. Every key is in Keys, and all of them are configurable (Configuration). The configuration reloads itself when you save it.

Getting started walks through a first session. Code and git reviews an agent’s change, from its diff to its merge. Links and vaults explains how links find their notes, across folders too. Vaults, home and Elsewhere explains the folders slipbox works in, with examples.

For agents

These commands run on the demo folder. Go there with cd examples/vault. If slipbox isn’t installed, use bun ../../src/main.ts in its place.

slipbox resolve 'equipment/telescope-comparison.md#Summary' --from home.md --json
slipbox backlinks telescope-comparison --json
slipbox find 'Aster' --json                  # a note's text, or every note's
slipbox read home --json                     # the raw text and its sha
slipbox write home --stdin --if-unchanged  < new.md
slipbox replace home Aster Astra --dry-run --json
slipbox task 2026-09-14-weekly 17 --check
slipbox write observing-log-2026 --append -- '- 22:10 seeing 2"'
slipbox stat home --json                     # size, dates, title, link counts
slipbox links --all --json                   # every link, and whether it resolves and how
slipbox link telescope-comparison --from home --json   # a link to write, in this folder's convention
slipbox resolve slipbox://halden/home.md --json        # a named folder's file, wherever it is here
slipbox capture --ref ../../src/main.ts:1-3 --snippet
slipbox render home --plain

With --json, each call gives one JSON object. The exit codes are stable.

The skill in skills/slipbox/SKILL.md teaches the surface to agents, and slipbox carries it. slipbox skill --install ~/.claude/skills installs the one matching the binary.

For you, the same ground is in Working with agents and The command line.

Documentation

• docs/: the user documentation, with guides to start with, and a manual covering every key, setting and command. It’s also on its website, .
• CHANGELOG.md: what each release changed.
• ARCHITECTURE.md: a map of the code, for whoever changes it.
• ACCESSIBILITY.md: what the TUI does for accessibility, and its limits.
• CONTRIBUTING.md: how to report a bug, ask a question or suggest an idea, and the code of conduct.
• blueprint/: the design, with its requirements, how it works, the decisions behind it and the roadmap.

Development

To run slipbox from source, you need Bun 1.4.2 or later:

bun install
bun src/main.ts examples/vault   # the TUI, on the demo folder
scripts/install-local.sh         # a `slipbox` launcher in ~/.local/bin

To check a change:

bun run check          # typecheck, the core-never-imports-tui boundary, dependencies, lint, the docs' lint,
                       # spelling and links, tests
bun run test:terminal  # the terminal tests: slipbox itself, driven by keys in headless terminals

blueprint/design/testing.md describes the test strategy, the demo folder (examples/vault) and the terminal tests.

Thanks

slipbox’s rendering was measured against leaf, RivoLink’s lightweight Markdown reader for the terminal: it set the bar for how Markdown should look there. If reading is all you need, leaf is the one to use.

Licence

slipbox is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Each release carries the licence and NOTICES.txt. NOTICES.txt lists the third-party software built into the binary, and their licences. Beside each build, its SBOM lists the same in CycloneDX’s format.