Apex

Measured, not guessed

Every number here comes from the benchmark suite in the repository, run on an ordinary 8-core Linux box with software rendering (so a real GPU only makes it quicker).

• 166 msprocess start to window, empty
• 71 µsto type a character in a 1 MB file
• 3.6 msper keystroke with 1,000 cursors
• 926 MiB/sliteral search through 10 MB
• 248 µsre-highlight after an edit in 100 KB of Rust
• 458 msto open a 100 MB file

Plus around 42,000 lines of Rust, fuzzed text transactions, settings, search and session parsers, and a feature matrix that records what's verified and what isn't. I'd rather tell you a limitation than have you find it.

The tour

Click any of these for the full-size picture.

Everything in the box

• ⚡Editing engine

  A rope buffer with viewport-only layout. Unicode-correct carets that understand grapheme clusters, wide characters and tabs. Transactional edits with undo that coalesces like you'd expect. Auto-pairing, smart indentation, snippets with tab stops.

• 🎨Syntax

  Incremental tree-sitter highlighting for 30 languages, including injections (code fences in Markdown, script and style in HTML). Folding, symbols, bracket matching, indent guides and a minimap.

• 🔍Search

  Incremental find and replace with regex, whole word, case and in-selection modes. Project-wide Find and Replace in Files that respects your gitignore.

• 🧭Navigation

  Goto Anything, command palette, jump history, breadcrumbs and bookmarks. Get anywhere in three keystrokes, come back in one.

• 🗂Workspace

  A lazy project explorer that copes with enormous trees, a file watcher, tabs with drag, pin and preview, split panes, several views of one file, sessions and crash recovery.

• 💾Careful with your files

  Encodings and line endings detected, converted and preserved. Atomic saves that refuse to flatten a file another program has just changed. A large-file mode and a hex preview.

• 🌲Git, properly

  Gutter marks, a Source Control panel, stage by file, hunk or line, commit and amend, diffs, blame, branches, log graph, stash, conflict resolution, fetch, pull and push, and GitHub pull requests through the GitHub CLI.

• 🛠Build tasks

  Run your builds with trust gating, problem matchers and a Problems panel. Ctrl+B and away you go.

• 🧠Language servers

  Optional, and only in folders you trust. Completion, diagnostics, hover, signature help, go to definition and references, rename, code actions and formatting.

• 🎛Make it yours

  Layered TOML settings, a key map with chords and per-platform sections, user themes, snippets, and spell checking with Hunspell dictionaries.

• 🧘Focus modes

  Distraction-free, zen, low-distraction and fullscreen, with typewriter scrolling. Very handy when your brain has seventeen tabs open already.

• 💻Command line

  apex file.rs:120:8, apex ., a single instance with --new-window, --wait so it works as $EDITOR, and --diff old new.

Why build an editor in 2026?

Honestly? Because the tool you use for eight hours a day matters more than almost anything else on your machine. When it hesitates, even for a few hundred milliseconds, you lose the thread. And if your brain works like mine, losing the thread isn't a small cost: it's the difference between finishing the thing and suddenly reorganising your dotfiles.

Sublime Text understood that better than anyone. When we couldn't use it, the options were Electron editors that take a breath before every action, or full IDEs that want to be your whole operating system. Neither felt right. So Apex is deliberately a text editor, not an IDE: no plugin system yet, no scripting runtime yet, no telemetry, no account, and nothing that needs the network.

Engineering decisions

• Only lay out what's on screen. A rope buffer plus viewport-only layout means a million-line file costs about the same to scroll as a ten-line one.
• Transactions all the way down. Every edit, from one keystroke to a thousand-cursor paste, is a single reversible transaction, so undo always does the obvious thing.
• Never lose a byte. Saves are atomic and check that nobody else changed the file first. Sessions and unsaved buffers survive a crash.
• Trust before execution. Build tasks and language servers only run in folders you've marked as trusted, because rust-analyzer runs a project's build scripts and that's real code.
• Honest about status. A feature matrix marks every feature as verified, implemented or partial, with notes. Real benchmark numbers, with the machine they ran on.

Your fingers already know it

The defaults will feel familiar if you've ever used Sublime. Cmd instead of Ctrl on macOS, and every one of them can be rebound.

Install it

On a Mac or on Linux with Homebrew, it's one line:

brew install andydixon/tap/apex

That builds Apex from source with stable Rust, so the first install takes a few minutes, then puts apex on your path. On Linux it adds the desktop entry and icons too. brew upgrade picks up new releases. On a Mac you get the command rather than an app in Applications, so start it from a terminal with apex ., or grab the DMG build described below.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE or Arch: install it from my signed package repository, repo.dixon.cx, and updates arrive with the rest of your system. On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://repo.dixon.cx/dixon.gpg | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/dixon.gpg >/dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/dixon.gpg] https://repo.dixon.cx/apt stable main" |
    sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dixon.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install apex

On Fedora, RHEL, AlmaLinux or Rocky:

sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/yum.repos.d/dixon.repo https://repo.dixon.cx/rpm/dixon.repo
sudo dnf install apex

openSUSE and Arch are one or two lines more, and they're on the repository page along with the key fingerprint and how to remove it all again. The packages are for 64-bit x86 and need glibc 2.35 or later, which covers Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 and anything newer.

Runs on

The packaging scripts in the repository build everything from source. Linux (X11 and Wayland) as a tarball, a .deb or an AppImage. Windows 10 and 11 with an installer that can add "Open with Apex" to Explorer, or as a portable zip. macOS as a DMG, with Apex in Finder's Open With menu for any file.

Apex is at version 0.2.1 and pre-release. It's our daily editor, but expect rough edges, and tell me when you find one.