Atuin Desktop is a local-first application for turning scattered terminal commands into executable Runbooks that look like documents but run like your terminal.
Atuin Desktop is built by the same team as Atuin, the “magical shell history” tool, and reuses the idea that your shell history is a valuable store of operational knowledge rather than throwaway logs.
From the outside it feels like a cross between a notebook, a wiki and a terminal, but the mental model is very much “runbooks that run” rather than generic note taking.
# Origins
The project grows directly out of Atuin CLI, which syncs and searches shell history across machines instead of leaving you to hunt through `~/.bash_history`.
Once Atuin users started using history search as an informal source of “how we do things around here”, the obvious next step was to move from ad-hoc history recall to structured, repeatable Runbooks.
Atuin Desktop was announced in 2025 as that next step, and later released as a fully open source project under the Apache-2.0 license on GitHub - github.com/atuinsh/desktop 
# Runbooks That Run In Atuin Desktop a runbook is a linear or lightly branched sequence of blocks that blend documentation with live actions. The core idea is that things you would normally do manually in a terminal, database client or HTTP tool should live alongside the explanation of *why* you do them, and should stay executable rather than rotting as static prose. A typical runbook might log into a server, set environment variables, run a health check, query a database, hit a Prometheus endpoint and then record outcomes, all in one place.
# Block-Based Editor
Atuin Desktop uses a block-based editor designed for operational workflows, rather than generic essay-writing.
Each line or section is a block that can be reordered, duplicated and parameterised, making it feel closer to tools like Notion than to a traditional terminal or markdown editor.
Under the hood the editor borrows from modern web Block-Based Editor work such as BlockNote, giving Atuin Desktop rich-text, checklists and structured content as first-class citizens instead of afterthoughts - blocknotejs.org
Blocks are typed: some hold narrative documentation, others are executable (:contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
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