zmax-gui is a native desktop GUI for the zmax editor — a Helix fork — the way MacVim wraps the Vim CLI. A thin Tauri v2 shell runs the zmax binary in an embedded PTY terminal filling the window, wrapped in the shared zgui-core app baseline (ZGui.appShell: ⌘K command palette, colour‑scheme picker, settings, CRT/splash). Same modal core underneath; a native window, chrome and theming on top. In active development.
Same Editor Core
The full zmax modal editor (Helix lineage — tree‑sitter, LSP) runs unchanged inside the window. The GUI is the shell, not a reimplementation.
Ecosystem Only
Terminal from the shared zpwr-embed-terminal; chrome from zgui-core. No bolted‑on widgets.
Standard Layout
The MenkeTechnologies GUI app layout: app/src-tauri shell, crates/ Rust embeds, frontend/lib/zgui-core. Verified by the baseline gate.
Project Workbench
Quick Open fuzzy finder (⌘P), Find in Files with regex (⇧⌘J), Search & Replace (⇧⌘H), Go to Symbol (⇧⌘O), Find Definition (⇧⌘D), TODO/Markers (⇧⌘T), Bookmarks (⌘B), persisted Recent Files (⌘E), a Project Files tree manager (⇧⌘E), Batch Rename, persisted Snippets (⇧⌘I), a Project Stats report and a two-file Compare — all in the ⌘K palette, opening results at path:line:col.
Text Transforms
On-disk file helpers with a dry-run preview: Sort Lines (reverse / ignore-case / numeric / unique), File Cleanup — line-ending (LF/CRLF), trailing-whitespace, tab expand/tabify and final-newline normalisation, Align Columns on a delimiter (align-regexp), Comment/Uncomment a range (⇧⌘/) with the language's prefix, and File Encoding detect + transcode (UTF-8 / UTF-16 / Latin-1). Applied on disk, then reloaded in the editor; binary/oversized files skipped.
Git Tools
A Git Changes panel that stages / unstages / discards files inline, per-line Blame (⇧⌘B), per-file History with the diff each commit introduced, a repository-wide Log and ASCII Commit Graph, Diff Revisions between any two branches/tags/hashes, a two-file Compare via git diff --no-index, Branch list / checkout / create, and Stash save / pop / drop / show. All driven by the Rust host, opening results in the editor.
Honest Status
MVP: the editor runs in the embedded terminal with the zgui baseline. Native tabs, menu bar and open/save dialogs are roadmap, not yet shipped.
Architecture
The desktop app (this repo) is the Tauri v2 shell + the zgui front‑end that mounts ZGui.appShell and the fullscreen terminal. The editor is the external zmax binary, run in a PTY — so unlike the engine‑hosted apps in the stack, the "core" here is a standalone editor, not an embeddable webui engine.
Where it goes next
Bundle zmax as a Tauri sidecar (no PATH dependency); launch the editor directly via a spawn_program addition to the shared terminal; then native tabs, menu bar and GUI dialogs. See the MenkeTechnologiesMeta umbrella for the wider stack.