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Getting Started

Install

Two ways to get Thor:

  • Download a release — grab the archive for your platform from the Releases page and unpack it anywhere. thor (or thor.exe) is ready to run; assets/, plugins/ and settings/ beside it are loaded at startup, so keep the whole folder together. What you change in Settings lands in a user/ directory beside them, which no update replaces.
  • Build from source — see Building from Source. Needed if no release matches your platform, or you want a development build.

First start

A release is not code-signed, so both desktops stop it once:

  • Windows — SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway. It asks only for the file you downloaded.
  • macOS — the download is in quarantine: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine thor-*-macos-arm64.

Compare the archive against the SHA256SUMS the release publishes if you want to know it arrived whole. An update Thor installs itself is checked against that file already, and starts with no warning.

Updating

Thor asks GitHub for a newer release shortly after it starts, at most once a day. When it finds one it offers to install it; Help > Check for Updates asks at any time and ignores the daily limit.

Answering no is remembered: that version is never offered again. The update does not go away, though — a button appears in the title bar showing the new version, and clicking it brings the offer back whenever you want it. Turn the background check off entirely with check_for_updates in Configuration, or from Settings > Updates.

Installing downloads the archive for your platform, checks it against the SHA256SUMS the release publishes, replaces the files beside the binary and restarts into the same folder. Two things are left alone: user/, which holds everything you changed in Settings, and sessions/, which holds your open tabs and layout. An install made before those two directories were split gets its settings/ carried over into user/ on the first update.

Thor updates itself only when it is a release build unpacked from an archive. A build from source, or one in a directory it cannot write (/opt, C:\Program Files), reports the new version and opens the Releases page instead. It also needs curl and tar, which Windows 10 1803 and later, macOS and most Linux distributions already ship.

If an update is interrupted part-way, the next start puts the old files back — they are kept beside the new ones with an .old suffix until then. In the one case it cannot repair, the binary itself is missing and thor.exe.old (or thor.old) is beside it: rename it back.

Opening a project

thor                    # reopen the last session's folder, or the welcome page if there is none
thor .                  # open the folder Thor was called from
thor src/               # open that folder
thor main.odin          # open the file, with its folder as the workspace
thor a.odin b.odin      # open both as tabs, with b.odin active
thor src/ main.odin     # open the folder as the workspace and the file as a tab

Several files open as several tabs, in the order given, and the last one is active. The first folder becomes the workspace; a second folder argument is ignored, because one window holds one workspace. Use File > Open Folder... with open_folder_in set to new to get a second folder in its own window.

A bare thor with no past session opens a welcome page instead: a tip of the day, Open Folder, Open File and a list of recently opened workspaces. `File

Close Workspace` returns to it from an open workspace, and a later bare launch comes back to the welcome page too.

The tip card carries one tip a day, with the chord it is about read from your own keybindings. The arrows on it step through the rest, and tips.json holds them (see Configuration).

With a folder open there is no welcome page, so the same card floats in the corner of the editor on the first start of each day. ✕ closes it for now, the line under it turns tips off for good, and so does the tip_of_the_day setting.

Inside the editor, File > Open Folder... switches the workspace and File > Open File... opens a file from anywhere; dropping a folder or files on the window does the same. Each folder keeps its own session (open tabs, layout), restored when you come back to it.

Opening a second folder while one is already open asks whether to replace the current window's workspace or launch a new window — configurable via the open_folder_in setting (see Configuration).

A folder that is already open in another window is never opened twice; that window is brought to the front instead. On Linux and macOS this needs a desktop helper — xdotool or wmctrl on X11, osascript on macOS — and the status bar says so when none is available (Wayland has no equivalent).

A first tour

  • Title bar — drag it to move the window, double-click it to maximize the window or to restore it; the buttons on its right minimize, maximize and close.
  • Explorer (ctrl + b to toggle) — the file tree for the open folder.
  • Editor — tabs across the top; ctrl + tab for fuzzy file search, ctrl + w to close a tab.
  • Console (ctrl + t to toggle) — a real shell, one per tab; + on its tab strip lists the shells found on the machine.
  • Command palette (ctrl + .) — fuzzy-search and run any action Thor exposes; every keybinding below is also a command here.

Rest the cursor on a control to see what it does: the title bar buttons, a tab, a status bar segment and an explorer row all explain themselves, with the chord they are bound to under the text. The tooltips setting turns this off.

For Odin, hover a symbol with ctrl held to see its declaration, alt + enter (or ctrl + click) to jump to its definition, and ctrl + shift + u for the code actions available at the caret.

Every other language gets the same features from a language server. Settings > Language Servers (or Help > Language Servers) lists the ones Thor knows: whether each is installed, what state it is in, and a button that installs a missing one in the console. clangd, rust-analyzer, gopls, basedpyright, typescript-language-server, lua-language-server and zls are on out of the box; another two dozen — slangd, ruff, jdtls, intelephense, taplo and more — are one switch away. Thor starts a server the first time you open a file it claims. See Configuration for the server table and how to add one of your own. A language server also scopes ctrl + shift + u to the current selection instead of only the caret, and can apply its own edits directly in the editor.

Help > Tutorial opens an interactive walkthrough of the shortcuts above, inside the editor itself. Help > Documentation opens this manual in Thor's Markdown preview, and Help > Documentation in Browser opens it outside the editor.

Next steps

  • Keybindings — the full shortcut reference.
  • Configuration — themes, fonts, per-project settings.
  • Plugins — how syntax highlighting and workspace plugins work.