No tutorial. No muscle-memory tax. If you come from VS Code, Zed, or JetBrains, everything works the way you expect: visible menus and tabs, a command palette, familiar shortcuts, real mouse support. And your coding agent gets a cockpit, not just a terminal tab.
brew install GurYN/tap/cove
A scripted walkthrough: open a file, split the view, run a build, right-click to stage, commit — then hand the next change to Claude Code and review it. Click to skip ahead.
Claude Code, aider, codex, opencode — anything that runs in a terminal. Flag it agent = true in the config and the panel it runs in becomes a cockpit: you feed it context, it queries your language servers, and every edit it makes lands in a review queue.
Select code and press Alt+A: it lands in the agent's prompt as a path:line-line reference plus a fenced block. Same for the file under the cursor or the diagnostic under it. Cove never presses Enter for you.
Cove serves its warm language servers over MCP: diagnostics, definition, references, hover, symbols, rename, project search — straight from gopls, pyright, tsc, rust-analyzer or clangd, instead of the agent re-running builds and grepping.
Launching the agent takes a checkpoint. The Review panel lists what changed since, per prompt. r reverts, a accepts by staging, x pastes the hunk back to ask about it, d shows checkpoint │ now. Files that gained errors are flagged.
One [apps.*] entry with agent = true. Register the MCP server once from the palette (Agent: Register Cove's MCP Server with Claude Code) and every agent started in the panel finds its editor through COVE_SOCKET. Outside Cove, the server simply has no tools.
Tree-sitter highlighting ships built in for fifteen languages — C/C++ is the newest — plus the config files around them: .env, .gitignore, go.mod, lockfiles, shell dotfiles, INI-style files. Language servers plug in from your PATH — seven come preconfigured, and any other registers with a few lines of TOML. The same servers answer your agent over MCP.
Still on TypeScript 5? Cove probes your tsc once and falls back to typescript-language-server automatically — no config needed. On a Mac, clangd already ships with the Xcode command line tools.
macOS / Linux. Builds from source (tree-sitter uses CGo); Homebrew pulls the Go toolchain for you.
Go 1.26+ and a C compiler. Then open a file or a whole directory.
On Windows? Cove runs great in WSL — install with Homebrew inside it.
Every keybinding, theme, server, agent, and AI endpoint lives in one TOML file. A Vim keymap is one setting away — opt-in, never default. Cove is pre-1.0 and in active development, MIT-licensed and open on GitHub.