A tiny local text editor with a VS Code–class editing core — about 5 MB on disk.

Monolith wraps Monaco Editor (the same editing engine behind VS Code) in a native macOS shell built with Tauri + Vue 3. You get familiar editing power without Electron’s hundreds of megabytes.

Credits: Editing experience powered by Monaco Editor (Microsoft). Thank you to the Monaco / VS Code teams.

Monolith is for people who want to open, read, and edit text files quickly — markdown notes, configs, logs, source — without launching a full IDE.

• Syntax highlighting for common languages (TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, Rust, Go, Java/Kotlin, C/C++, SQL, Shell, Ruby, PHP, Swift, R, HTML/CSS, YAML, TOML/INI, GraphQL, Dockerfile, and more)
• Multi-tab editing, undo/redo, find, indent/outdent
• SQL format action when the buffer is SQL
• Recent files menu

• Split view: Monaco source ↔ WYSIWYG preview (TipTap)
• Block-level source map sync and highlight between panes
• Edit from either side when in split / preview modes

• Markdown — rich WYSIWYG
• HTML — sandboxed preview
• JSON / XML — structured tree preview
• Other types — editor-focused view

• Open / save / save as for UTF-8 text
• Finder Open With / double-click for registered text types
• Default-handler helper script after install
• Rejects binary payloads (null bytes) instead of corrupting the buffer
• Brings the app to the front when a file is opened from Finder

• No telemetry, no cloud sync, no account
• All I/O is local filesystem via Tauri commands

Monolith registers 59 extensions (see src/file-types.json), including:

.md .markdown .json .jsonc .yml .yaml .xml .svg .html .css .ts .tsx .js .jsx .py .rs .go .java .kt .c .cpp .sql .sh .vue .toml .ini .csv .graphql …

Plus special basenames such as Dockerfile / Makefile.

Not every byte on disk is “text.” Binary files are refused. Unknown extensions are not silently treated as plain text — the allow-list in file-types.json is the source of truth.

Release: v0.1.0

Windows installers are produced by .github/workflows/build-windows.yml (workflow_dispatch or version tags).

swift scripts/macos-set-default-handlers.swift src/file-types.json

Requirements: Node.js 20+, Rust stable, macOS with Xcode CLT.

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Release build:

npm run tauri build

npm run build syncs macOS file associations from src/file-types.json into src-tauri/tauri.conf.json (keeps Finder types and Monaco languages aligned).

Finder / Open With
       │
       ▼
  Tauri (Rust) ── read/write UTF-8, quarantine clear, activate window
       │
       ▼
  Vue 3 UI ── tabs, toolbar, i18n
       │
       ├── Monaco Editor (source)
       └── TipTap / HTML / tree previews

Design notes live under docs/superpowers/specs/.

MIT © reallyMu

Monaco Editor is used under its own license (MIT). See third-party notices in dependency licenses after npm install / cargo tree.

• Apple Developer ID + notarization for Gatekeeper-clean distribution
• Intel (x86_64) macOS build
• Windows x64 NSIS installer (CI)
• Optional Linux target via Tauri
• User-configurable association list beyond the built-in allow-list
• Single-instance / second-file open while already running on Windows

• Monaco Editor — the editing core that makes Monolith feel like a slice of VS Code
• Tauri — tiny native shell
• Vue · TipTap · markdown-it