dashtext

Dashtext

Quick capture for plain text, inspired by Drafts.

About

Dashtext is a place to put text first and decide what to do with it later. Press a shortcut, type, save — the draft lands in your inbox. Come back when you have time to process it.

It is an open-source, cross-platform take on Drafts, written in Rust with GPUI and GPUI Component. Linux is the first-class target; macOS and Windows should work but are not yet tested.

[!NOTE] This is an early, opinionated personal project. Version 0.4 is a ground-up rewrite; nothing from the Tauri-based 0.3 releases carries over, including their data.

Features

The drafts window: sidebar with Inbox, Flagged, Archive, All and Trash, the draft list and the editor

Quick capture window — a small window for getting text down (a floating panel on macOS). Ctrl+Enter saves to the inbox; Esc closes it and keeps the text for next time, even across restarts.
Inbox, Flagged, Archive, All and Trash — drafts live in one folder at a time; flags work across folders. The trash empties itself after 30 days.
An editor that stays out of the way — every draft is plain Markdown text. It saves as you type, the first line becomes the title, and empty drafts are discarded instead of piling up.
Search — words must all match, "quoted phrases" match exactly, -word excludes.
Keyboard first — every command has a shortcut, and the shortcuts are listed in the menus.
Command line — dashtext capture opens the capture window in the running app; dashtext new adds a draft without opening anything.

The quick capture window over the drafts window

Usage

dashtext                      Open the drafts window
dashtext capture              Open the quick capture window
dashtext new "Call Sam"       Add a draft to the inbox
echo "from a pipe" | dashtext new --flag

A second dashtext hands its request to the running instance, so dashtext capture opens instantly once the app is running.

Global capture shortcut

Wayland does not let applications grab global shortcuts themselves, so bind one in your desktop environment to run dashtext capture:

GNOME: Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts
KDE Plasma: System Settings → Shortcuts → Add New → Command
Sway / i3: bindsym $mod+Shift+d exec dashtext capture
Hyprland: bind = SUPER SHIFT, D, exec, dashtext capture

Keyboard shortcuts

Command	Shortcut
New draft	`Ctrl+N`
Quick capture	`Ctrl+Shift+N`
Search drafts	`Ctrl+F`
Back to the list from the editor	`Esc`
Flag / unflag	`Ctrl+Shift+L`
Archive / move to inbox	`Ctrl+Shift+A`
Move to trash / restore	`Ctrl+Shift+Backspace`
Delete permanently (in the trash)	`Ctrl+Shift+Delete`
Inbox, Flagged, Archive, All, Trash	`Ctrl+1` … `Ctrl+5`
Save capture	`Ctrl+Enter`

On macOS, Cmd replaces Ctrl.

Where your drafts live

Drafts are stored in a SQLite database following the XDG Base Directory specification:

What	Linux
Draft library	`$XDG_DATA_HOME/dashtext/library.db` (usually `~/.local/share/dashtext/`)
Instance socket	`$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/dashtext/dashtext.sock`

macOS uses ~/Library/Application Support/app.dashtext.Dashtext/ and Windows uses %APPDATA%\dashtext\Dashtext\data\.

Installation

Binaries are not published yet. To build from source you need Rust and the native libraries GPUI uses. On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential clang cmake pkg-config \
  libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev libwayland-dev \
  libx11-xcb-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libvulkan1

Then:

git clone https://github.com/joshuadavidthomas/dashtext.git
cd dashtext
cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/dashtext ~/.local/bin/dashtext
install -Dm644 resources/linux/app.dashtext.Dashtext.desktop \
  ~/.local/share/applications/app.dashtext.Dashtext.desktop

The desktop entry includes a Quick Capture action, so launchers and docks can open the capture window directly.

Troubleshooting

It feels slow

Dashtext draws with the GPU through Vulkan. Without a Vulkan driver (in many VMs and remote desktops, for example), it falls back to llvmpipe, which draws every frame on the CPU. Typing and scrolling then lag no matter how fast your CPU is, and Dashtext shows a No GPU acceleration notice. Set DASHTEXT_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 to hide it.

Run vkcube (from vulkan-tools) to check that Vulkan works.
On machines with two GPUs, choose one with DRI_PRIME=1, or with ZED_DEVICE_ID=0x… using the device ID shown by lspci -nn | grep VGA. Dashtext uses Zed’s renderer, so Zed’s GPU troubleshooting applies too.
Debug builds are much slower than cargo build --release.

Building runs out of memory

The release profile uses thin LTO with a single codegen unit. On small machines, build with cargo build --profile release-fast instead: it is still optimized, but it compiles in parallel without LTO.

Roadmap

Tracked with bd in .beads/. Highlights:

Tags, and workspaces built on them (saved filters with their own sort)
Actions: scriptable steps that send a draft somewhere (the scripting runtime is still undecided — WASM, Lua or JavaScript)
Version history for drafts
Markdown syntax highlighting and preview
Global shortcut via the XDG GlobalShortcuts portal
Import and export of Markdown files
Sync, and eventually mobile apps

Contributing

PRs are welcome, though I may be slow to review. The code is a Cargo workspace:

crates/dashtext-core — the draft model and SQLite storage, with no UI dependencies
crates/dashtext — the desktop app (GPUI and GPUI Component)

The toolchains and tools come from devenv, so you need Nix and devenv. direnv is optional: with it, direnv allow loads the environment whenever you cd into the repository. Without it, run devenv shell.

Run just to see the development commands (just test, just clippy, just fmt), and devenv test to run everything CI checks.

Acknowledgments

Inspired by Drafts by Agile Tortoise.

License

Dashtext is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for more information.

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