A coding IDE built for a phone — not shrunk from a desktop.
Mouse is a native iOS app where an entire development environment lives in a gesture-driven shell: you swipe between editors, pinch workspaces open and closed, and edit files with the file itself, right in place. It talks to GitHub directly — sign in, clone, edit, commit, push, pull — with no server, no git binary, and no dependencies beyond the platform.
C・プ
＼( ）
｀｀
The screen is a window onto a ring of containers, split into horizontal lanes. A strip of rings extends off both edges of the screen. One law decides every input conflict between the shell and container content:
One-finger horizontal drags and all two-finger gestures belong to the shell, everywhere. Content gets taps, vertical scrolling, and the keyboard.
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Horizontal drag on a lane | Swipe to the next/previous container on the ring |
| Drag from a screen edge | Swipe the whole ring — travel between rings, or mint a new one |
| Drag a divider | Resize the two adjacent lanes |
| Two-finger spread / pinch | Open / close a lane; pinching the last lane closes the ring |
| Tap, vertical scroll, keyboard | The container's — trees scroll, editors edit, terminals type |
A ring holds one project (a workspace). Its containers are windows onto that project: Files browses it, the Viewer edits its open file, the Graph shows its history, the Terminal runs commands in it. Two rings on the same repo share one workspace — same tree, same git state — but keep their own open file and terminal, so swiping between rings is switching between editors on the same project. Two rings on the same file share one live document: keystrokes in one are instantly the other's content.
The full interaction and architecture reference lives in swift/README.md.
- Onboarding ring — the gestures teach themselves; motion is the arrow
- GitHub sign-in — OAuth Device Flow, tokens in the Keychain
- Workspaces — clone any of your repos via the tarball API, extracted by a from-scratch native tar/gzip reader
- Files — lazy tree, tap to open
- Editor — in-place editing with a floating keyboard that never shifts the app, debounced autosave, live shared buffers across rings
- Commit graph — branch rails, merges, tips, drawn like a desktop client
- Terminal — native command dispatcher (
ls,cat,grep,open, …) scoped to the workspace - Push & pull — corner action chips: one real commit via the Git Data API; pull with upstream detection
- Persistence — the whole strip survives force-quit and relaunch
- iPhone (portrait) and iPad (all orientations, iPhone-sized minimum window)
Requirements: macOS with Xcode 16+ and xcodegen
(brew install xcodegen).
cd swift
xcodegen generate # regenerates Mouse.xcodeproj from project.yml
open Mouse.xcodeproj # build & run the Mouse schemeOr headless:
xcodebuild -project swift/Mouse.xcodeproj -scheme Mouse \
-destination 'generic/platform=iOS Simulator' buildThe project file is generated — edit swift/project.yml,
never the .xcodeproj, and re-run xcodegen generate after adding, removing,
or renaming source files.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
| swift/ | The app. project.yml is the project definition; Mouse/ is all sources |
| swift/README.md | Deep reference: gestures, containers, architecture |
| DESIGN.md | The design language — surfaces, type, motion, voice |
| ROADMAP.md | The vision: product branches, each absorbing a desktop product |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | How to work on Mouse |
| AGENTS.md | The contract for AI agents (and a landmine map for humans) |
| sketches/ | Design history — screenshots of the idea finding its shape |
Pre-release and moving fast. The shell, GitHub round-trip, and editing are real and daily-drivable; git is still API-backed (libgit2 is next). The larger vision is a gesture shell that absorbs the jobs of whole desktop products — VS Code first (that's this branch), then Cursor, n8n, Figma, and more — each developed on its own product branch. The map is in ROADMAP.md.
Mouse is iOS/iPadOS native only, by decision: no Android port, no web build, no cross-platform framework. Expect sharp edges.
MIT © Reagent Systems and Mouse contributors.