tek

a music making program for 24-bit unicode terminals.

written in rust with ratatui on crossterm for jack and pipewire.

tek is available as source, statically linked binaries, and on the aur.

author is reachable via mastodon @unspeaker@mastodon.social or matrix @unspeaker:matrix.org

usage

• requirements: linux; jack or pipewire; 24-bit terminal (i use kitty)
• recommended: midi controller; samples in wav format; lv2 plugins.

keymaps

• arrows/wasd: navigate
• tab: toggle editor
• enter: write note
• z: unlock zoom
• - / =: zoom midi editor
• space: play/pause
• esc: options
• f1: help/command list
• f2: rename
• f6: save
• f9: load

installation

from distro repositories

arch linux

tek is available as a package in the AUR. you can install it using an AUR helper (e.g. paru):

paru -S tek

building from source

requires docker

git clone https://codeberg.org/unspeaker/tek # obtain source
cd tek                                       # enter directory
cat bin/release-glibc.sh                     # preview build script
sudo bin/release-glibc.sh                    # run build script
sudo cp bin/tek /usr/local/bin/tek           # install

design goals

• inspired by trackers and hardware sequencers, but with the critical feature that 90s samplers lack: able to resample, i.e. record while playing!

• pop-up scratchpad for musical ideas. low resource consumption, can stay open in background. but flexible enough to allow expanding on compositions

• human- and machine- readable project format simple representation for project data enable scripting and remapping.