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, with Windows coming soon. 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 an OpenGL-capable driver. Only Rune's GUI needs one: rune --headless loads no graphical library and runs on a machine that has none.

Install

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

Other ways to install

Homebrew

On macOS and Linux:

brew install unstablebuild/tap/rune

Rune updates itself, so you don't need brew upgrade for it. To remove it, run brew uninstall rune, or add --zap to delete your user data and settings too.

Debian and Ubuntu

Download the .deb for your architecture (amd64 or arm64) from the latest release, then install it from the download directory:

sudo apt install ./rune_*.deb

apt pulls in the OpenGL and X11 libraries Rune's GUI needs. Rune does not update itself when installed from a package: install the newer .deb the same way to update. If you want automatic updates, use the install command instead. To remove it, run sudo apt remove rune.

The package needs Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04 or newer. On older releases, use the install command instead: its build runs on Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Arch Linux

Rune is in the AUR as rune-ide. With an AUR helper such as yay:

yay -S rune-ide

Without one, build it with makepkg:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/rune-ide.git
cd rune-ide
makepkg -si

Rune does not update itself when installed from a package: update it with yay, or with git pull and makepkg -si. If you want automatic updates, use the install command instead. To remove it, run sudo pacman -R rune-ide.

Omarchy

Omarchy is Arch Linux and ships the yay AUR helper, so Rune installs from the AUR:

yay -S rune-ide

Rune then appears in the app launcher. Hyprland runs it through XWayland, which Omarchy already includes. yay updates it with the rest of your system. If you want Rune to update itself instead, use the install command. To remove it, run sudo pacman -R rune-ide.

Other Linux

On Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, Void, and other glibc distributions, the command above installs the prebuilt release. To build it from source instead, install make and the build dependencies for your distribution, then:

git clone https://github.com/unstablebuild/rune.git
cd rune
git checkout "$(git tag --list 'v*' --sort=-v:refname | grep -v -- - | head -n 1)"
GOTOOLCHAIN=auto make rune-install-linux

The git checkout line selects the latest release, skipping prereleases. GOTOOLCHAIN=auto lets Go download the version Rune needs when your distribution's Go is older. Fedora's Go does not do this by default.

This installs Rune in ~/.local/rune.app, links ~/.local/bin/rune, and adds Rune to your desktop's applications. Add ~/.local/bin to your PATH if it is not there already. Rune keeps this install up to date itself.

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 four 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.
• helix, if you come from Helix and want its selection-first grammar, where a motion picks the target and the operator acts on it.

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 runs in a pane beside 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. Skip moves past a step; Stop ends the lesson.

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.