Rewrite Desktop v0.1.1
A bugfix release. If you downloaded v0.1.0, replace it — that build can lose
your tabs, and the failure is silent.
Why this exists
Opening Rewrite twice could wipe your data. Saving is not incremental: each
save clears the stores and rewrites them from the snapshot in that instance's
memory. So a second window did not even have to be used — closing it flushed its
own, older snapshot over everything the first window had written since. There was
no warning, and nothing in the UI hinted at it.
v0.1.1 refuses to start a second instance: the second launch exits immediately
and no second window opens. The guard has to be native — the browser mechanisms
for this (BroadcastChannel, Web Locks) do not reach outside a single webview
process.
It also asks the existing window to come forward, and that part does not work
on Wayland: compositors ignore an activation request from a process you did not
just interact with. Measured on niri, identically from this AppImage and from a
source build. So on Wayland a second launch looks like nothing happened — which is
correct behaviour, just not obvious. The README says so too.
A failure to read the database now says so. Previously the cause was swallowed
and you got an empty editor with a vague toast — indistinguishable from having no
data. There is now a banner that states three things: what you type right now will
not be saved, existing data has not been touched, and what usually causes this.
The underlying error goes to the console instead of being discarded.
That failure has one known cause worth naming: WebKit changed its IndexedDB
metadata format between 2.50 and 2.52. This AppImage ships 2.50 (Ubuntu 22.04,
for glibc compatibility). If you have already run Rewrite built from source on a
current rolling distro, that build silently upgraded your database to the new
format and this AppImage can no longer open it — the direction is one-way and no
code change fixes it. Pick one: the AppImage, or a source build. Do not alternate
between them on the same machine.
Your data survives either way: the app refuses to write when it could not read.
Download
Rewrite_0.1.1_amd64.AppImage — x86_64 Linux.
chmod +x Rewrite_0.1.1_amd64.AppImage
./Rewrite_0.1.1_amd64.AppImageRequires glibc ≥ 2.35 — Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, Fedora 36+, Arch.
Built the same way as v0.1.0: in a container on Ubuntu 22.04, because an
AppImage bundles its libraries but not glibc. It still expects the libraries
AppImage deliberately never bundles — X11/Wayland, OpenGL, fontconfig, freetype.
Every Linux desktop has them; a bare container does not.
.deb and .rpm come out of the same build but are not published: nobody has
installed them on Debian or Fedora, and an untested package looks like a support
promise this project cannot back.
What Rewrite is
A prompt-first editor: write the prompt in a real editor instead of a cramped
terminal input, then send it straight into your agent's terminal with Ctrl+Enter
— tmux, Herdr, or
Orca. See the
web README for what it does.
Everything else in this release is documentation
No features were added. The README now warns against mixing the AppImage with a
source build on one machine, and the demo recording was replaced — the old one was
from June and showed an indicator that no longer exists.
Honest scope
Unchanged from v0.1.0: Linux-only, x86_64 only, no auto-update, no
Windows/macOS builds. Tests cover pure logic and the IndexedDB layer; components
and hooks are not covered. This is a personal tool made public as a portfolio
piece — it works for its author, but no support or stability is guaranteed, and
issues may sit.
Contributions aren't being solicited — fork freely instead.