Vincent

A mouse-first terminal client for reviewing code that AI agents wrote, and correcting it in place. Vincent van Go.

Your agent writes the code. Vincent shows you the diff, you click a line and leave a note, and one keypress drops those notes back into the agent's prompt. When a fix is smaller than a note, you type it yourself.

What it does

• A file tree, and a Zed-shaped Changes panel that lists every tracked and untracked file, grouped by repository when you point Vincent at a folder of repos.
• Inline diffs: dual old/new gutters, ± markers, and a darker word-level tint on just the part of a line that changed.
• Review notes that click onto a diff line and land in the agent's prompt through herdr, or on the system clipboard when there's no pane to send to.
• A small real editor — type, select, undo, find and replace, save — with a conflict check that refuses to overwrite a file the agent rewrote out from under you.
• Rendered markdown, toggled per tab.
• Find in files across the project.
• Four blunt git writes: save a buffer, git checkout a branch, commit everything tracked and untracked in one shot, git push. Nothing finer — no staging, no amend, no rebase. That's lazygit's job.

The review loop

Esc r on a diff line opens a small composer. Cycle its kind with Tab — issue, suggestion, question, praise, or none — write a note, and it joins the batch in the git panel's footer. Esc ⏎ sends the whole batch to the agent; Esc y copies it to the clipboard instead.

A note never touches the source. What it anchors to is a frozen snippet of the diff, captured the moment you wrote the note, so the batch stays true to what you actually reviewed even after the agent rewrites the file and the line numbers move on.

This is what a batch looks like once it reaches the agent:

Please address these review comments.
Comment kinds: ISSUE (must fix), SUGGESTION (consider)

## Comments

1. **[ISSUE]** `internal/app/gitpanel.go:214`
   +	if len(entries) == 0 {
   this drops the empty-repo case; the header should still say Changes (0)

2. **[SUGGESTION]** `internal/app/gitpanel.go:240-244`
   +	for _, e := range entries {
   +		rows = append(rows, row(e))
   +	}
   could be a single append with a mapped slice, but not blocking

Keys

Press Esc to arm the leader — you have 1.5 seconds to press one more key before it disarms. Esc again cancels. There are no Ctrl+ shortcuts; they fight tmux and terminal emulators. Esc ? shows this same table inside the app, generated from the same source, so it can never drift out of date. A few actions also live on the right-click menu, but every one of them is on this list too — right-click is a redundant path, never the only one.

Review

Key	Does
Esc d	Diff
Esc e	Open file
Esc r	Note
Esc y	Copy review
Esc g	Changes
Esc ⏎	Send

Git

Key	Does
Esc c	Commit
Esc P	Push
Esc b	Branch

Search

Key	Does
Esc p	Find file
Esc /	Find
Esc F	Find in files

View

Key	Does
Esc f	Explorer
Esc t	Tab bar
Esc z	Fold all
Esc m	Markdown
Esc o	Root

Edit

Key	Does
Esc s	Save
Esc S	Save as
Esc n	New file
Esc u	Undo
Esc U	Redo
Esc a	Select all

Session

Key	Does
Esc w	Close
Esc q	Quit
Esc ?	Keys

Install

go install github.com/chasereyn/vincent@latest

Or download a binary from the Releases page: vincent-darwin-arm64, vincent-darwin-amd64, vincent-linux-amd64, vincent-linux-arm64, vincent-windows-amd64.exe, plus checksums.txt.

Or clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/chasereyn/vincent
cd vincent
make install        # builds, then copies to ~/.local/bin

macOS: the release binary is unsigned. On first launch, macOS quarantines it; clear that with:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./vincent-darwin-arm64

Requires Go 1.24+ and git on PATH to build. No cgo, no runtime, no external rendering tools at run time.

As a herdr plugin

herdr plugin install chasereyn/vincent
herdr plugin action invoke chasereyn.vincent.open

The install step downloads the release binary for your platform and checks it against checksums.txt, or builds from source when Go is on PATH. The open action toggles Vincent in its own tab; open-split puts it beside the current pane. Bind a key:

[[keys.command]]
key = "prefix+v"
type = "plugin_action"
command = "chasereyn.vincent.open"

Vincent's review handoff prefers herdr, a terminal multiplexer for agent panes. Without it — or without an agent pane running — Esc ⏎ falls back to copying the review batch onto the system clipboard instead of delivering it directly.

Config

~/.config/vincent/config.json, all keys optional:

{
  "icons": "auto",
  "tabBar": false,
  "recentRoots": []
}

• icons — "auto" (default) detects a Nerd Font at startup; "on" / "off" force it either way.
• tabBar — show the full tab strip. Default false: with one tab open, row 0 just names it until you turn the strip on.
• recentRoots — folders Esc o offers, most recent first. Vincent rewrites this on every root switch; entries that no longer exist are dropped on load.

Failed herdr sends log their full error to ~/.config/vincent/herdr.log rather than the terminal, which a raw-mode TUI would otherwise paint over.

Design rules

• #030405 background, set explicitly, never inherited from the terminal.
• Ayu Darker palette, matched to one specific Zed setup.
• Mouse first: click, drag, and scroll work everywhere; keyboard is the supplement.
• Single static binary — no cgo, no runtime, nothing shelled out to at run time except git and herdr.
• Four writes, all blunt, and nothing finer.
• Esc leader only, no Ctrl+ chords, no menu.

Provenance

Forked from spice-edit (Cloudmanic, LLC, MIT). Upstream file headers keep their original authorship — that's the MIT attribution requirement, not a leftover.

Shaped by reading, not copying, these projects: herdr — the pane-send handoff. tuicr — the review-note wire format. herdr-sidebar — the inline diff renderer's origin. herdr-reviewr — the herdr client and its error handling. lazygit — why Vincent's git writes stop at four. Zed — the Changes panel's shape and the palette.

Contributing

This is a personal tool, built for one person's review workflow. See CONTRIBUTING.md: pull requests are closed automatically, bug reports are welcome, forks are welcome.

License

MIT.

Copyright (c) 2026 Chase Reynolds.
Copyright (c) 2026 Cloudmanic, LLC. (spice-edit, from which this is forked)

See LICENSE for the full text.