Clide

Your friendly terminal IDE — a file explorer, a project-wide search, and a tabbed editor, in the terminal.

Install

Globally, via pipx — clide then works in any terminal, in its own isolated environment:

pipx install --editable .

--editable means the installed command runs this checkout directly, so edits here take effect immediately. Drop it for a frozen copy, and after bumping the version run pipx reinstall clide.

Or into a local venv for development only:

pip install -e .

Usage

clide                 # open the current directory
clide .               # same thing, explicitly
clide ~/projects/app  # open a directory
clide main.py         # open a file (workspace becomes its directory)
clide src/ a.py b.py  # open a directory and two files in tabs

The workspace root — what the explorer shows and what search scans — is the first directory argument, or the common parent of the files given, or the current directory.

Keys

Key	Action
ctrl+b	Toggle the sidebar
ctrl+shift+e	Show the Explorer
ctrl+shift+f	Show Search
ctrl+s	Save the active file
ctrl+w	Close the active file
ctrl+pgdn / ctrl+pgup	Next / previous file
ctrl+d	Toggle dark mode
ctrl+shift+q	Quit

Tabs show ● when a file has unsaved changes, and ✕ closes one. Closing a file with unsaved changes warns once (with a summary of what would be lost) before discarding.

These keys are bound with priority=True so the focused editor cannot swallow them; as a result ctrl+w and ctrl+d do not perform their usual TextArea edits. Use ctrl+backspace and delete for those.