Skip to main content

Getting Started

Rune is a fast, keyboard-driven IDE for power users. The Unix way, finished as a product: code, terminals, CLI tools, language intelligence, debugging, and AI agents, all in one composable, multi-workspace environment.

Prerequisites​

Rune runs on macOS and Linux. Find your platform below for the specifics.

macOS​

  • Architecture: Apple Silicon or Intel.
  • Version: macOS 13.3 (Ventura) or newer.

Linux​

  • Architecture: x86_64 or arm64.
  • glibc: version 2.28 or newer (Debian 10+, Ubuntu 20.04+, Fedora 33+, or RHEL/Rocky/AlmaLinux 8+). The requirement is a floor, not a ceiling, so newer versions are fine. musl-based distributions such as Alpine are not supported.
  • Graphics: a graphical environment (X11, or Wayland via XWayland) with the system OpenGL and X11 libraries installed and an OpenGL-capable driver. On a minimal or headless install you may need to add your distribution's OpenGL (Mesa) and X11 client library packages. Most desktop installs already include them.

Install​

curl -fsSL https://api.rune.build/install.sh | sh

Your first steps​

Open Rune. The first launch asks one question, then hands you to a guided tutorial that runs inside the IDE.

1. Pick your key bindings​

Rune ships with three built-in editors, so pick the one that feels like home:

  • standard, if you come from VS Code, Cursor, Sublime, or a plain text editor.
  • vim, if you come from Vim or Neovim and want modal editing everywhere.
  • emacs, if you come from GNU Emacs and want an Emacs-style keymap everywhere.

The choice applies everywhere, not just in editor buffers: terminals, input boxes, and the file explorer all follow it. Rune writes the matching preset into your configuration, so you can change it later from Configuration and Key Mapping.

Set the same preset here

The Preset button at the top of this page decides which key bindings these docs show. Click it until it matches the editor you picked, and every key on every page will match your setup.

If the text is too small, press <meta> and + to make the font bigger, or <meta> and - to make it smaller.

Whichever you pick, the rest is already wired: language intelligence, debugging, terminals, and tasks ship in the box.

2. Run the basics tutorial​

Rune starts the basics tutorial for you right after the first-run setup. It renders as an overlay on top of the real IDE, using your bindings and your theme, and it advances when you actually run the command it asks for, not when you click through a slideshow.

Have a project directory handy. The first step asks you to open it as a workspace.

Basics walks you through:

  • Workspaces: the home workspace, the nine workspace slots, and workspaceopen.
  • Files: edit, the file explorer, and tabs.
  • Windows: split, focus, move, resize, maximize, and close.
  • Terminals: terminal splits, plus one-shot programs such as ! git log.
  • Commands: how they are named, and why that makes the fuzzy finder fast.
  • Your configuration: switch themes, then make the change permanent.
Nothing to memorize

Press <alt-/> at any point for a cheat sheet of every key and command the tutorial teaches.

Go at your own pace. From the command prompt (<shift-meta-p>), run tutorial stop to leave the tutorial, and tutorial start basics to take it again from the top.

3. Keep going​

When basics finishes, Rune offers the next tutorial. You can also start either one yourself from the command prompt:

  • tutorial start navigation: structural navigation and Rune's code intelligence tools.
  • tutorial start agent: install Rune Agent, connect a model provider, and start a conversation.

Finish the agent tutorial and you get a help command. It opens this documentation as a workspace inside Rune and starts an agent with those pages in scope, so you can ask it to troubleshoot a problem or walk you through a configuration change instead of searching a site.

After that, the Command Prompt guide covers the prompt in depth, Configuration covers making Rune yours, and the Docs Workspace guide covers reading the documentation offline. You can also write your own tutorials to onboard your team into a repository.

Ask Rune Agent