A lightweight Windows text editor for working across a folder full of notes, logs and data files. Point it at a folder, search everything in it, and read or edit whatever comes back.
Written in C++ and rendered with plain GDI. The only dependency is platform-h, the Win32 abstraction it shares with its sibling apps — nothing third-party. It starts instantly and typically uses a few megabytes of memory.
Still a work in progress. (for about 10 years)
- Folder browser — navigate a root folder; create, rename and delete files inline
- Multi-file search — live search across the folder, grouped by file with highlighted matches (
Ctrl+Shift+F) - Four document views — text, Markdown, CSV table and hex, chosen automatically and remembered per file
- Syntax highlighting — C++, Rust, Python, PowerShell and Markdown
- C/C++ navigation — go to definition (
F12), switch header/source (Ctrl+F12), and navigation history (Alt+Left/Alt+Right), using a lightweight lexical index rather than a compiler - Editing — unlimited undo, word wrap, indent/unindent, spell check
- Coding agent — talk to GitHub Copilot about the open folder (
Ctrl+Shift+A, orF4to type) - Utilities — JSON reformat (
Ctrl+R), sort and de-duplicate lines, evaluate a selected expression (Ctrl+E) - Session memory — restores the recent root folders and the last document open in each
Open documents are never closed behind your back: unsaved files stay in memory with their full undo history and are shown in red. You are prompted to save only when changing folder or exiting.
The right-hand panel hosts a coding agent that can read and change the folder you have open. It needs GitHub Copilot CLI installed and signed in; Rethinkify runs it as a child process and speaks the Agent Client Protocol to it.
The conversation is not hidden in the application — it is session.md in the folder you opened. Open it, edit it, delete a turn that went wrong, and the agent carries on from what the file says. It survives restarts, one conversation per folder.
Nothing runs without your say-so: every tool the agent proposes is shown with its exact command and numbered choices, and waits. /yolo turns that off for a session if you want it to get on with things, and is never restored automatically.
/help, /h |
What you can type |
/clear, /c |
Empty the conversation (Ctrl+Z brings it back) |
/stop, /s |
Stop the current turn |
/models, /m |
List models, or pick one |
/yolo |
Run tools without asking |
Requires Windows x64 and Visual Studio with the Desktop C++ workload. The vendored dd runtime locates Visual Studio and uses the CMake and Ninja that ship with it.
.\dd.ps1 build # both configurations
.\dd.ps1 test # build and run the suite
.\dd.ps1 launch # build, then start a persistent appOutput is exe\rethinkify-64.exe, or rethinkify-64d.exe for Debug. Neither
run nor launch closes an already-running copy, so close the app before
rebuilding its executable.
The platform layer comes from platform-h
via FetchContent; a sibling ../platform-h checkout is used automatically
when present.
- docs/design.md — architecture, views, keyboard reference and configuration
- docs/cpp.md — the lexical C/C++ index behind go-to-definition
- AGENTS.md — conventions for contributors and coding agents