jano

A modern terminal editor with plugin support.
nano simplicity. VS Code power. Zero bloat.

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Install

Linux / macOS

curl -fsSL https://janoeditor.dev/install.sh | bash

Homebrew

brew tap jano-editor/jano && brew install jano

Windows (PowerShell)

irm https://janoeditor.dev/install.ps1 | iex

npm

npm install -g @jano-editor/editor

Features

• Familiar shortcuts - Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+C/V, Ctrl+A - no learning curve
• Syntax highlighting - via plugins for JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, TOML, YAML, JSON, Markdown, Shell, Dockerfile and more
• Auto-formatting - press F3 to format the entire document
• Autocomplete - plugin-driven completions plus buffer words, works with multi-cursor
• Inline validation - errors and warnings shown directly in the editor (F4 for details)
• Multi-cursor editing - Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down to stack cursors, Ctrl+D for next occurrence
• Mouse support - click, double/triple-click to select, drag, scroll, auto-scroll at edges
• Search & Replace - Ctrl+F with live results
• Respects your files - keeps LF or CRLF line endings and a UTF-8 BOM (mixed line endings are normalized). Tabs, emoji and CJK are drawn at their real width
• Crash recovery - unsaved changes are backed up in the background (~/.local/state/jano/backups/). After a crash or a killed terminal, a banner offers to restore them (Ctrl+R)
• .editorconfig - indentation, line endings, BOM, trailing whitespace and final newline follow the project's .editorconfig (F9 shows which values come from it)
• Settings dialog - F9 for tab size, line numbers, autocomplete and the startup animation
• Structured debug logs - --debug writes JSON events to ~/.cache/jano/logs/ for easy bug diagnosis
• Plugin system - install plugins from the Plugin Store. On first start a welcome dialog offers the recommended plugins and installs them without a restart (turn it off in F9)
• 60,000+ lines - no lag, starts instantly. One standalone binary, or about 85 KB of gzipped JavaScript
• Cross-platform - Linux, macOS, Windows, WSL

Usage

# open a file
jano config.yaml

# new file
jano

# manage plugins
jano plugin install yaml
jano plugin list
jano plugin remove yaml
jano plugin search

# update jano
jano update

Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+Q	Exit
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / Redo
Ctrl+X / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V	Cut / Copy / Paste
Ctrl+A	Select All
Ctrl+F	Search & Replace
Ctrl+G	Go to Line
Ctrl+R	Recover Unsaved Files
Ctrl+D	Select Next Occurrence
Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down	Add Cursor Above / Below
Ctrl+Space	Trigger Autocomplete
Alt+Up/Down	Move Line
F1	Help
F2	History Browser
F3	Format (plugin)
F4	Diagnostics
F9	Settings

Plugins

Plugins add syntax highlighting, formatting, validation and more for any file format.

jano plugin install javascript
jano plugin install python
jano plugin install toml
jano plugin install yaml
jano plugin install json
jano plugin install markdown
jano plugin install shell
jano plugin install dockerfile

Browse all available plugins at janoeditor.dev/plugins.

Build your own

A plugin is a single TypeScript file. Since plugin API v2, hooks like onFormat, onValidate and onComplete may return a Promise, so slow work never blocks typing. See the plugin guide or check out plugin-python as a reference.

Packages

This is a monorepo with the following packages:

Package	Description
@jano-editor/editor	The editor
@jano-editor/ui	Terminal drawing library
@jano-editor/plugin-types	Plugin interface types

100% JavaScript

jano is built entirely in JavaScript/TypeScript. No native addons, the standalone binary is the same code bundled with the Bun runtime. If you can read JS, you can understand and extend jano.

License

MIT