Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some frequent issues and questions we receive about Atuin Desktop.

The app doesn’t launch, or launches with a blank window.

Tauri/WebkitGTK has known issues on Wayland and systems using proprietary Nvidia drivers; here are some things you can try:

  • Run the app with GDK_BACKEND=x11
  • Run the app with WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1
  • Run the app with WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1, although this increases CPU usage

Undo/redo is inconsistent, or doesn’t work.

Currently, the main runbook document and each code editor have their own separate undo stack. We would like to unify them at some point in the future.

I host my own Atuin sync server. Can I use Atuin Desktop with it?

The Atuin CLI/sync server and Atuin Desktop are completely separate applications and use different databases and backends. While Atuin Desktop can access your local Atuin CLI history to make editor suggestions, your CLI history and Atuin Desktop data remain completely separate.

Is Atuin Desktop open source? Can I run my own backend server?

The plan is that Atuin Desktop will be open source once we feel it is ready. The backend for Atuin Desktop, called Atuin Hub, is much more complex than the CLI sync server, and we don’t have short-term plans to offer an open-source version of this — but we’re open to changing this down the line.

I’d like to edit Runbooks in an external editor / manage Runbooks via source control software

Atuin Runbooks are backed by CRDT-based documents, and we don’t currently support editing them in an external editor. There’s a future where we support some custom format that’s both human readable and writable, but it’s unlikely to be soon.

We will, reasonably soon, support import and export of the following:

  1. Full document with rich data (e.g. a JSON blob)
  2. Lossy markdown (we can’t encode all the data we work with into standard markdown)
  3. A combination of the above

As well as local-only file backed workspaces.

Our intention with Atuin Hub is to make synchronizing, sharing, and editing Runbooks as frictionless as possible. If the Hub isn’t meeting your needs, or you have some other reason for preferring VCS Runbook management, we would love to hear from you here on the forum or in our Discord.

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