GitHub - osigurdson/mib: A tiny, fast Markdown scratchpad with Vim keys and inline images.

A 300KiB, Vim-inspired Markdown scratchpad with inline images, for Linux (Wayland). It's a local, single-binary desktop app with no Electron or WebView dependencies.

Nine pages, no file management

With mib, there are no files to manage, just nine scratch pages that you switch between as needed.

Why nine? mib's focus is on working notes, not building an archive. This is more than enough to manage a few threads (e.g. meeting notes, screen captures and notes on a bug you are working on, preliminary ideas on how to improve things, etc.). Anything more permanent usually lands in a git repo or wiki anyway.

Optional OCR and integrated image search

If Tesseract is available on your machine, mib will OCR the text in the images that you paste in. Any search terms found in the images are highlighted as shown below. Set MIB_OCR=0 to turn it off.

Themes

Despite its small size, mib has dark / light modes and even a few built in themes (mib - default, tokyonight, catppuccin, kanagawa and everforest).

Install

On Linux (x86_64, Wayland, glibc 2.39 or newer):

curl -fsSL https://osigurdson.github.io/mib/install.sh | sh

This installs the latest release to ~/.local after checking its checksum; run it again to upgrade. The download page has the release files and how to check where they came from, or you can build from source. mib --version shows the release and commit you're running.

Build and run (Linux, Wayland)

mib runs in a Wayland session (GNOME, KDE Plasma, Hyprland, Sway and so on). There is no X11 support.

You need a C compiler, Make, pkg-config, Python 3, and the Wayland, libxkbcommon and wayland-protocols development packages:

To read text in screenshots so search can find it, also install Tesseract and its English data. It's optional, and everything else works without it.

Build and run:

Install to ~/.local/bin/mib, with a mib launcher entry and icon:

Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. Run make install again to update; your pages and settings are kept. PREFIX (default ~/.local) changes where it goes, and DESTDIR adds a staging root for packaging. make clean removes the build.

There is also an experimental Windows build; see Appendix: Windows (experimental).

Using mib

Run mib. It opens on the page you were last using, in normal mode.

• Alt+1 to Alt+9 switch pages, and Alt+0 or :ls lists them.
• Editing is Vim-style: normal, insert and visual modes, motions, operators, text objects, counts, registers, search and :s.
• Paste a screenshot or drop an image file to add it to the page.
• :w or Ctrl+S saves, and :q closes; mib won't close with unsaved changes.
• :help shows a short card. :set view=source, normal or reading changes how Markdown is shown, and :colorscheme picks from five color schemes, each with light and dark backgrounds.

The key reference lists every key and command.

File Organization

Your notes live in ~/Documents/mib (~/mib if there is no Documents folder), or in $MIB_DIR if you set it:

~/Documents/mib/
├── 1/
│   ├── page.md                                  page 1, as plain Markdown
│   └── assets/
│       ├── 20261030-142211-a1b2c3d4.png        a screenshot
│       ├── 20261030-142211-a1b2c3d4.png.txt    its text, read by OCR
│       └── 20261030-142211-a1b2c3d4.png.tsv    word positions, for highlighting
├── 2/
…
└── 9/

A page's folder appears the first time you open that page. On Linux, mib makes the folders private (0700) and new files private (0600).

You can grep the folder, edit a page.md in another editor, or keep it all in git. If you edit a page elsewhere, mib reloads it when you switch back, as long as you have no unsaved typing in it. :Ex opens the page's folder in your file manager.

Settings (color scheme, view, font size, window size, line numbers) are kept in ~/.config/mib/config, and the last page and cursor positions in ~/.local/state/mib.

How it differs from Vim

mib isn't meant to replace Vim or Neovim, but the keys and flow should feel the same: motions, counts, operators, text objects, visual mode, . repeat, marks, named registers, / search and :s all work. The main differences:

• y, d and p use the system clipboard, like clipboard=unnamedplus. Named registers work as in Vim.
• Ctrl+V pastes instead of starting block visual mode, which mib doesn't have.
• Macros, Ctrl-A/Ctrl-X, insert-mode counts, :g, :sort, :m, :t and :normal aren't implemented.
• :s supports a small, Vim-like subset of regular expressions, so unusual patterns may behave differently.
• There's no vimrc or plugins.

Development

make test          # unit and integration tests
make format        # apply .clang-format (make format-check to check)
make windows       # check the Windows build still compiles
make test-windows  # run the Windows tests under Wine
make demo          # re-record the README demos from the real editor (script in tools/demo.py)
make memory        # launch mib and measure its idle memory (needs a Wayland session)
make page-preview  # build .build/linux/tools/page-preview, which renders a page to a PPM

Optional checks drive the real app in a private headless Mutter session and leave your desktop and clipboard alone. They need Mutter, dbus-run-session and PyGObject, plus Vim for the parity check:

make test-linux-e2e  # real keyboard and clipboard input, large notes, undo/redo
make vim-compare     # type each case in tests/vim-compare.toml into mib and Vim, compare

GitHub Actions runs make, make test and make format-check on every push and pull request (.github/workflows/ci.yml). Windows isn't in CI yet; run make test-windows locally after touching shared or Windows code.

To release, tag a commit on main and push the tag:

git tag -a v0.1.0 -m "mib 0.1.0"
git push origin v0.1.0

.github/workflows/release.yml then builds and tests that commit, creates the GitHub release with checksums and attestations, and refreshes the download page (site/, built by tools/site.py).

More detail:

• Platforms and source layout
• Windows build and Wine verification
• Font format and rasterizer
• Color schemes

Credits and licenses

The bundled font is a subset of JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, under the SIL Open Font License (fonts/OFL.txt, fonts/NERD-FONTS-LICENSE.txt). PNG and JPEG decoding uses stb. The color schemes are adapted from Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Kanagawa and Everforest; their licenses are in third_party/. Release tarballs carry these licenses in licenses/.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Appendix: Windows (experimental)

The Windows version uses the same editor with a native Win32 window. It builds and passes its tests under Wine, but hasn't been tried on a real Windows machine yet. Windows 10 version 1703 or newer is the target.

To cross-build mib.exe from Linux, you need CMake, Ninja, Zig and Python 3 (Wine to run it there):

make windows       # writes .build/windows/mib.exe
make run-windows   # build, then open it under Wine

Copy .build/windows/mib.exe to a Windows machine and run it; it needs no other files. docs/windows.md has the details and what has been verified.