The shroud for Helix.

abaran wraps your editor with the terminal tools you need day-to-day — a file tree, git interface, and project-wide find-and-replace — all without leaving the terminal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iJ05Y5YRg

The name comes from the Bengali word আবরণ — a shroud or covering. abaran cloaks Helix behind a seamless TUI layer: you browse your project in the tree, open files directly into Helix, toggle into gitui for git ops, or drop into serpl for interactive find-and-replace. The PTY machinery that pipes I/O between tools runs invisibly underneath.

This is a stopgap. Once Helix ships a plugin system that handles file manager, git UI, project wide search and replace plugins, this project becomes obsolete. Until then, abaran is here to fill the gap.

No pull requests. I can't responsibly review PRs — this codebase is entirely AI-generated and I have no way to verify that incoming changes aren't malicious. If you find a bug or want a feature, open an issue and I'll look into it.

• File tree — gitignore-aware, Nerd Font icons, lazy-loaded directories
• File operations — create, rename, delete (trash or rm -f), copy/paste
• gitui — toggle into gitui for staging, commits, and branch management (Ctrl+G)
• serpl — toggle into serpl for interactive project-wide find-and-replace (Ctrl+S)
• Seamless Helix integration — files open in Helix running inside a PTY with zero-latency I/O forwarding
• No tmux required — all tools share a single terminal window

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pxlmrror/abaran/main/install.sh | bash

Installs the latest release binary to ~/.local/bin. Supports x86_64 and aarch64 Linux.

If ~/.local/bin is not in your PATH, add this to your shell config:

export PATH="${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}"

git clone https://github.com/pxlmrror/abaran.git
cd abaran
cargo install --path .

To upgrade to the latest release:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pxlmrror/abaran/main/install.sh | bash

Or if built from source:

cd abaran
git pull
cargo install --path .

abaran              # open current directory
abaran ~/projects   # open a specific directory

abaran creates a pseudo-terminal (PTY) via nix::pty::openpty, forks Helix inside it, and stores the PTY master file descriptor. In tree mode, ratatui renders the file tree on the alternate screen. Pressing Enter writes :open <path> to the PTY master to open the selected file. In tool mode, a poll-based I/O loop forwards keystrokes to the PTY and PTY output to stdout, intercepting toggle keys inline. When you switch back to the tree, Helix keeps running — its output is drained in a non-blocking loop to prevent flow-control deadlocks.

MIT