Rivet

Rivet is a Windows-native text editor focused on fast startup, clean behavior, and reliable recovery. It is intentionally compact: the core workflows are implemented deeply instead of spreading effort across a large plugin surface.

Why Rivet

• Native Win32 UI with a Scintilla editing engine
• Strong session recovery model with periodic snapshots and crash-safe writes
• Fast, predictable keyboard-driven editing flow
• Minimal visual noise with a practical status bar and focused menus

Core Capabilities

Editing

• Multi-document tabs with three placements:
  • Top (classic horizontal tabs)
  • Left (vertical list)
  • Right (vertical list)
• Resizable vertical tab panel with persisted width
• Dirty document indicators in both top and vertical tab views
• Word wrap toggle and Always On Top toggle in the View menu
• Zoom (menu, shortcuts, or Ctrl+mousewheel) shared across all tabs and persisted between sessions
• Live word count in the status bar
• Reload from Disk in the File menu (with unsaved-changes confirmation)

Search and Navigation

• Find/Replace workflow:
  • Ctrl+F, Ctrl+H
  • F3, Shift+F3
  • Match case, whole word, regex, wrap
  • Replace All grouped into a single undo step
• Go To Line (Ctrl+G)
• Find in Files with cancel support

File and Session Safety

• Session restore with open tabs and active tab tracking
• Recent Files (MRU) menu, persisted across sessions
• Encoding detection: UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16 LE/BE, with Windows-1252 (ANSI) fallback for legacy files
• Periodic backup snapshots for unsaved changes
• Crash-safe atomic writes for session and backup data
• Stale temp cleanup at startup

Language and Text Tools

• Syntax highlighting for common formats (JSON, XML, Python, PowerShell, YAML, HTML, CSS, C/C++, and Markdown)
• Markdown heading folding (code-fence aware)
• Text transforms:
  • Uppercase
  • Lowercase
  • Trim Leading + Trailing Whitespace
• Clipboard path helpers:
  • Copy Full Path
  • Copy Filename
  • Copy Directory Path

Keyboard Shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
New file	Ctrl+N
Open	Ctrl+O
Save	Ctrl+S
Save all	Ctrl+Shift+S
Close tab	Ctrl+W
Cycle tab placement	Ctrl+Alt+T
Find	Ctrl+F
Replace	Ctrl+H
Find next / previous	F3 / Shift+F3
Go to line	Ctrl+G
Uppercase / Lowercase	Ctrl+Shift+U / Ctrl+U
Zoom in / out / reset	Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0

Installation

• Installer: download rivet-<version>-setup.exe from GitHub Releases
• Portable: download rivet-<version>-win64-portable.zip from GitHub Releases
• If SmartScreen warns, use More info then Run anyway

Shell Integration

• Open files from the command line: rivet.exe <file> [more files]
• Single instance: files launched while Rivet is running open as tabs in the existing window
• The installer adds an Open with Rivet Explorer context menu entry and registers Rivet in the Open with dialog and Settings > Default apps so it can be set as the default editor for text-like file types; uninstalling removes the registration
• The portable build supports the command line and single-instance behavior but does not register context menu or default-app entries

Build From Source

Requirements

• Windows 11 x64
• Rust stable toolchain

Commands

cargo fmt
cargo clippy -- -D warnings
cargo test
cargo run

Data and Configuration

Rivet stores state under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Rivet (fallback %APPDATA%\Rivet):

• settings.json for UI settings such as tab placement and vertical tab width
• sessions\session.json for remembered documents/session state
• backup\*.bak for snapshot files

Project Quality

• CI enforces formatting, linting, and tests
• Unit tests cover core session, settings, text transform, and command behavior
• Build metadata is embedded into Help -> About Rivet

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution rules and workflow.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Third-party notices: NOTICE.txt plus THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES/NOTICE.txt, THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES/Scintilla.txt, and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES/Lexilla.txt.