Accent

Accent is an opinionated text editor for code, markdown notes, and PDFs with an integrated terminal.

• Edit code with multi-line carets, inline suggestions and syntax highlighting.
• Write notes, use templates, and browse links and tags.
• Read and mark up PDFs; link highlighted passages back to your notes.
• Use split panes, shortcuts, and a command palette to work productively.
• Work with Git history, diff-views, terminal sessions, and on remote hosts over SSH.
• Available on Linux (Gnome) with an Android companion app

Some other cool features involve (but are not limited to):

• Focus mode, which fades out everything that is not around the caret
• Persistent terminal sessions a la tmux; no panic when closing a window with an actively running shell
• Automatic light and dark theme with a solarized option for both
• Presentation mode to show off whatever you're working on
• Early version of a draw.io editor (not just embedded; an actual native rust version!)
• MCP server and Codegraph-like explore command to make agents more efficient
• LaTeX (SyncTeX) PDF <-> Code sync: navigate from text to pdf and vice-versa

Accent is open source under GPL-3.0-or-later and still evolving.

Screenshots

Get started

Desktop

A Flatpak bundle is shipped with each release:

flatpak install --user accent-<version>-x86_64.flatpak

For a native install into ~/.local (GNOME 49 or newer: Fedora 43+, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian testing, Ubuntu 26.04+, Arch), go for the following:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stroblme/accent/main/install.sh | bash

To remove it again, add -s -- --uninstall after bash.

To build from source by hand, run:

make install-requirements	# install the build requirements (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch)
make requirements	# check local dependencies
make pdfium     	    # optional, for PDFs
make all        	    # build the GTK app and accent-cli
make install			# install the app user-wide

If you run accent from a terminal, you can also provide a path to a file or folder to open it directly.

accent-cli mcp serves a vault to an AI agent over the Model Context Protocol: search, read, backlinks, tags, links and PDF highlights, and edits to a note or one of its sections, each checked against the version the agent read. It shares the app's index and works with the app closed; --read-only leaves out the tools that write. For Claude Code:

In addition to the accent command, an accent-cli command provides a remote-ssh server functionality and can be used as an MCP server through:

claude mcp add accent -- /path/to/accent-cli mcp --vault /path/to/notes

This provides an agent with search, read, backlinks, tags, links and PDF highlights, and edits to a note or one of its sections. As it shares the accent's index, the mcp server can be used in a similar way as Codegraph to help your agent getting information faster and with less tokens.

Android

For Android, you can use Obtainium to retrieve the .apk from the releases.

To build it from source, install a JDK, the Android SDK and NDK, then build a debug APK:

make android-tools
make apk

Note that the Android companion app is still in a very early version; please be gentle.

Credits

Accent is inspired by awesome software projects like Apostrophe, Obsidian, and VSCodium. Icons come from Tabler.