zentxt is a stupidly simple tool for versioning text documents — no commands, no learning curve. Inspired by Steve Jobs' philosophy of simplicity and Apple's minimalist design, zentxt lets anyone track file changes effortlessly.
No branches. No jargon. Just your files, with a memory.
Download the latest release for your platform → GitHub Releases
Double-click to open. That's it.
macOS users — if macOS blocks the app on first launch, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".
- Or run this command in Terminal:
xattr -cr /path/to/zentxt.app
Windows users — if SmartScreen warns you, click "More info" → "Run anyway".
git clone https://github.com/Adriusops/zentxt
cd zentxt
wails3 devBackend — Go with Wails v3. A single native binary, no runtime dependencies.
Database — SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite. Local-first by design — your data stays on your machine, in a single file.
Frontend — Vanilla JS + Vite. Fast, minimal, no framework overhead.
Diff engine — go-diff. Computes character-level diffs between versions on the fly, no storage overhead.
CI/CD — GitHub Actions. Every push to main compiles the project and runs the test suite automatically. Every tag ships cross-platform binaries for Mac, Windows and Linux.
No cloud. No configuration. No account required.
Currently, ZenTxt stores every version of your file — but choosing what to keep is still manual. The next step is to let you review changes between two versions line by line, accept or discard specific edits, and merge them into a new version — similar to resolving a conflict in Git.
ZenTxt currently supports .txt and .md files.
Planned support for the most common text-based formats:
.docx— extract plain text from the OOXML structure (ZIP + XML), diff the content, ignore formatting metadata.odt— same approach, LibreOffice's open format.rtf— strip RTF tags, diff the underlying text.pdf— on the roadmap but more complex: PDF is a rendering format, not an editing one. Text extraction is doable but imperfect; scanned PDFs would require OCR.
zentxt does one thing well. It remembers your text files so you don't have to.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — Steve Jobs
zentxt is a solo side project, built with love and a genuine belief that software can be both useful and simple. It's also how I'm learning Go and DevOps in the open — one commit at a time.
If you believe in what this is trying to be, feel free to star, fork, or just say hi. 👋