Chords

A native GNOME guitar chords viewer. Browse, search, and save guitar chord sheets with a clean, performant interface.

Chords fetches tabs from freetar.de and renders them as plain monospace text — no web views, no bloat.

Features

• Search — Find songs online via Ctrl+F
• Library — Save chords for offline access, filter with Ctrl+K
• Transpose — Shift chords up/down with correct voicings from a 12,000+ chord database
• Auto-scroll — Hands-free scrolling with adjustable speed (toggle with Space)
• Chord diagrams — Visual fingering charts for every chord in the song
• Columns — Split long sheets into 1-4 columns
• Capo indicator — Prominent display when a song requires a capo
• Customizable — Pick any monospace font, adjust size, choose highlight colors
• Responsive — Sidebar collapses on narrow windows

Installation

• Ubuntu/Debian — download the .deb from Releases
• Arch Linux — install chords from the AUR
• Nix — nix run github:bjesus/chords
• AppImage — download from Releases
• Windows — download the .zip from Releases, extract, and run chords.exe

Building from source

Requires GTK4, libadwaita, and Rust.

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel

# Arch
sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita

# Build & run
cargo run

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+F	Search online
Ctrl+K	Filter library
Space	Toggle auto-scroll
Ctrl+Plus/Minus	Zoom in/out
Alt+Left	Back to search results
Ctrl+Q	Quit

Credits

Chord database from Fretboard by Brage Fuglseth (GPL-3.0). Tab data from freetar.de by kmille. Artist images from Deezer API.

License

GPL-3.0