We craft local-first productivity software for developers

🖥️ Products

Our mission is to elevate the UX for developer products and make developers who use them, happier and more productive in their daily lives. After all, developers are users too ❤️.

Despite the massive rise of autonomous coding agents and remote cloud VM administration, terminal UI and foundational primitives have largely stagnated since the 1990s.

We are reimagining the terminal for this era, to address the needs LLM harnesses and ergonomic remote cloud VM admin.

The first thing we are doing is creating better primitives (ROC) from the ground up in Rust (2.7M+ crates.io downloads) to bridge the gap in terminal capabilities since the 90's.

Available today, ROC provides a strictly type-safe, correctness-focused async TUI engine, headless virtual terminal emulation (VTE), low-latency PTY/TTY runtime, CLI/TUI apps (edi, giti), MCP servers, and IDE/browser extensions.

Built on top of this open-source foundation, we're building an upcoming closed-source suite of terminal apps at r3bl.com (which all work seamlessly over SSH). This includes a local-first collaborative "Google Docs meets Jupyter notebooks" for Markdown and virtual terminal multiplexers.

Our focus is on preserving data sovereignty, privacy, and enabling local-first computing, while enhancing developer productivity, knowledge capture & sharing, and workflow management.

🌍 Open source software

ROC is our Rust open source monorepo (2.7M+ downloads on crates.io). Its core library crate, r3bl_tui, consolidates our strictly type-safe, correctness-focused TUI engine (custom CSS/Flexbox layout engine, custom rendering engine, Elm-style state management, React/JSX-like declarative macros, and a full-featured Markdown editor component with custom Markdown parser and syntax highlighting), virtual terminal emulation (VTE), async readline, and terminal / PTY virtualization into a single unified crate.

Here are examples of what you can build using the TUI engine:

r3bl-cmdr is our open source command line (CLI and TUI) collection of utility apps that improve developer productivity. It is built using our own TUI engine in Rust. Currently it includes two apps:

• edi - Beautiful Markdown editor
• giti - Command line assistant to help make git easier to work with.

Here's a sneak peak at the UI:

🌟 Our ethos

Our products are anchored in the belief that technology should serve the needs of humans and all living things. We strive to understand what makes software usable and useful so it can unlock more human potential, by creating long term sustainable value. Central to our mission is preserving your data sovereignty, safeguarding your privacy, and empowering you with local-first computing, ensuring you always own your work, and your digital workspace & assets.

We believe in giving back to the community. That is why our foundational primitives, including our Rust async TUI engine, terminal virtualization engine, developer tools, and educational content, are open source and freely given. We want every developer to have access to world-class building blocks & education, and we can't wait to see what amazing products they build using them.

However, building solely free software is not the full story. Atop genuine value needs to be a long-term profitable & sustainable business model. Things must be in balance between the forces of give and take. To remain independent and thrive, our upcoming end-user applications are closed-source products, which will cost you money to buy. Not a SaaS business model, and no enshittification, but more like Sublime or JetBrains perpetual licensing: you buy the software, you don't rent it. History has proven that when software is free, you are the product. We categorically reject the surveillance economy: we will never harvest or sell your PII to data brokers, we perform zero ad tracking, and we build zero privacy-violating backdoors. When you buy our products, our incentives remain 100% aligned with you, not advertisers.

We are indie developers, innovators, and creatives at heart. We believe that money is not the only measurable outcome of something you create. And a transparent, sustainable business model gives us the freedom to keep coloring outside the lines of conformity.

Rebels race on! 🏁