Typewriter

A distraction-free text editor with the soul of a mechanical typewriter.

Built in C with SDL2 — fast, lightweight, cross-platform. Every keystroke clicks. Every carriage return clunks. The paper is warm, the cursor blinks, and the bell rings at column 80.

Features

• Real typewriter sounds — recorded mechanical key strikes, embedded directly in the binary. Supports concurrent/overlapping playback for a true tactile feel.
• Paper aesthetic — Multiple themes including Classic Cream, Dark Mode, and Terminal Green.
• Lightweight — single C file, near-zero CPU at idle.
• Cross-platform — Windows, macOS, Linux.
• Self-contained — one executable, nothing to install: sounds, icon and the typewriter font are embedded, and SDL2 is linked in statically.
• Find & Replace — Built-in search and replace functionality with a custom dialog (Ctrl+F).
• Settings Persistence — Automatically saves your preferences (sounds, line numbers, theme) to typewriter.ini.
• File Support — Open and save .txt, .md, and .ini files using native system dialogs.
• Drag and drop — drop a file onto the window to open it.
• Undo — Ctrl+Z with a 512-entry history.
• Options menu — Ctrl+K to toggle sounds, line numbers, notebook lines, and cycle themes.
• Hisashi menubar (Windows) — with Hisashi running, File / Edit / View / Help menus with every option and shortcut appear in its macOS-style menu bar. Off by default; switch it on in the Options menu.

Download

Prebuilt self-contained executables are attached to each GitHub release:

File	Platform
typewriter-windows-x86_64.exe	Windows 10/11 (64-bit) — just run it
typewriter-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	Linux x86_64, glibc ≥ 2.35 (Ubuntu 22.04+, Fedora 36+, …) — tar xzf and run ./typewriter
typewriter-macos-universal.tar.gz	macOS 11+ on Apple Silicon and Intel — tar xzf and run ./typewriter

The binaries are not code-signed. On macOS, Gatekeeper may refuse to open a downloaded copy; run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine typewriter once to clear the quarantine flag.

Settings are stored in typewriter.ini next to the executable, so keep it in a writable folder.

Build

Requires SDL2 and SDL2_ttf development libraries for the default (dynamically linked) build.

Windows (MSYS2/MinGW)

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_ttf
mingw32-make

macOS

brew install sdl2 sdl2_ttf
make

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev
make

Self-contained build

make STATIC=1 links SDL2, SDL2_ttf and FreeType into the executable so it runs on a machine with nothing else installed.

Windows (MSYS2/MinGW) — the MSYS2 packages above already include the static libraries:

mingw32-make STATIC=1

or, from any PowerShell prompt, .\build.ps1 (auto-detects MSYS2; -Clean, -Run, -Dynamic, -Installer).

Linux / macOS — first build static SDL2 and SDL2_ttf into deps/ (needs cmake, a C/C++ compiler and curl; on Linux also the X11/Wayland/ALSA/PulseAudio -dev packages listed at the top of scripts/build-deps.sh):

make deps        # once; downloads and builds SDL2 + SDL2_ttf statically
make STATIC=1

On macOS this produces a universal (arm64 + x86_64) binary. On Linux the result depends only on glibc; SDL2 loads X11/Wayland and audio backends from the system at runtime.

The same steps run in GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml) for every push, and pushing a v* tag publishes the three binaries as a release.

Releasing

The version lives in two places — TYPEWRITER_VERSION in main.c and [app] version in forge.toml (the installer scripts read the manifest) — so a release is:

1. Bump TYPEWRITER_VERSION in main.c and [app] version in forge.toml; commit.
2. Windows installer — .\build.ps1 -Installer builds the static typewriter.exe and stamps dist\Typewriter-Setup-<version>.exe with Forge (forge.toml; needs ..\Forge\build\forge.exe). The installer is per-user (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Typewriter), adds Start Menu / desktop shortcuts, registers in Add/Remove Programs and keeps typewriter.ini on uninstall.
3. macOS app — on a Mac, ./package_macos.sh --dmg builds the universal binary and assembles dist/macos-universal/Typewriter.app plus dist/Typewriter-<version>.dmg (ad-hoc signed; pass --sign "Developer ID Application: …" and notarize for wider distribution).
4. Tag and publish: git tag v<version> && git push --tags. CI attaches the raw Windows/Linux/macOS binaries to the release; add the installer and the image with gh release upload v<version> dist/Typewriter-Setup-<version>.exe dist/Typewriter-<version>.dmg, then write the release notes.

Usage

typewriter [options] [file]

Options:
  -h, --help       Show help and exit
  -v, --version    Show version and exit

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+O	Open
Ctrl+Q	Quit
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+F	Find & Replace
Ctrl+K	Options menu
Ctrl+C / X / V	Copy / Cut / Paste
Ctrl+A	Select all
Esc	Clear selection / Close dialog

Options Menu (Ctrl+K)

• Up/Down: Navigate options
• Left/Right / Space / Enter: Cycle themes, change the font size, or toggle options
• Esc: Close menu

Rows: Sound effects · Line numbers · Notebook lines · Theme · Font size · Hisashi menubar (Windows only).

Find & Replace (Ctrl+F)

• Tab: Switch between Find and Replace fields
• Enter: Find next occurrence
• Shift+Enter: Replace current match
• Esc: Close dialog

Save Dialog

• S: Save and quit
• D / N: Don't save and quit
• C / Esc: Cancel

Hisashi menubar (Windows)

Hisashi 0.5+ provides a macOS-style global menu bar for Windows. Turn on Hisashi menubar in the Options menu (Ctrl+K) and, whenever Typewriter is the foreground window, the bar shows:

Menu	Items
File	Open…, Save, Quit
Edit	Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find & Replace…
View	Sound effects ✓, Line numbers ✓, Notebook lines ✓, Theme ▸ (Classic Cream / Dark Mode / Terminal Green), Font size, Larger font, Smaller font, Options…
Help	Keyboard Shortcuts…, version

Checkmarks track the live settings and every row shows its keyboard shortcut. The integration is the single-header hoswl.h client vendored from Hisashi (sdk/hoswl): no threads, nothing ever blocks on the pipe, and if Hisashi is not running Typewriter simply retries every couple of seconds. The setting is persisted as hisashi_menubar= in typewriter.ini.

Fonts

The Special Elite typewriter font (Apache 2.0) is embedded in the executable, so no font files are needed. To use a different font instead, either:

• Place typewriter.ttf next to the executable
• Set the TYPEWRITER_FONT environment variable to a .ttf path

Both take precedence over the embedded font. To change the embedded font itself, replace typewriter.ttf in the source tree and run make embed-font (needs xxd) before building.

License

MIT