PostgreSQL
Server-side cancel, statement timeout, transactional tabs
Pre-1.0 · built in the open
SQL, at native speed.
Sen is a desktop SQL client for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and SQL Server — written in Rust on GPUI. One binary. No Electron. No web stack.
- 4dialects
- 1binary
- 0Electron processes
- 100%Rust
MySQL
One driver per dialect behind a single DbDriver trait
SQLite
A connection is a file — the form asks for nothing else
SQL Server
T-SQL that colours right, semicolon or not
The workspace
One window. The whole lifecycle.
Explorer, tabbed editor and results grid — pick a dialect below and watch a real query run. The tabs actually switch; the grid actually fills.
Sen
Rendering the app itself is Rust on the GPU — this page is just an honest impression of it.
Features
Small decisions that compound.
Every one of these exists because a real workflow asked for it. Hover a card — it leans in.
A tab owns one server session
The first statement a tab runs opens its own connection; every later statement reuses it.
BEGIN…COMMIT, temp tables, SET search_path and prepared statements behave
like they do in psql — and statements in different tabs never share a backend.
Stop cancels on the server
The Stop button issues pg_cancel_backend against the tab's own backend, so a runaway
query or pg_sleep halts mid-flight. A cancelled statement is reported as
“Query cancelled” — not an error — and the session stays usable.
Catalogue-aware completion
Ctrl Space completes keywords plus the tables, columns and functions your explorer already discovered — each item a precise edit over the engine's own span.
No blind DDL
Cell edits stage into one batch; the exact statements are confirmed before they run, and the grid shows the staged state until they do.
Editable results grid
Double-click a cell on a keyed single-table SELECT; Enter commits a primary-key-keyed UPDATE and patches the cell in place. Empty input writes SQL NULL.
Keys never touch disk
Passwords live only in the OS credential store — Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, Linux keyutils. Everything else is atomic tmp + rename.
History & drafts survive anything
Every statement is recorded with outcome and duration; unsaved buffers autosave, so a crash takes nothing with it. Click a history row to re-insert the SQL.
Ctrl+K everything
The command palette ranks commands, saved connections, loaded tables and views — and every bundled theme. .
The editor
An SQL engine lives in the editor.
Not a textarea with regex paint: the tokenizer, splitter, analyzer, formatter, safety and lint engine run in-process, on a debounce that wraps the whole pass.
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Dialect-aware highlighting — the engine's own token layer paints the buffer; a semicolon-free T-SQL script colours the same as a
;-separated one. -
Lint squiggles from the in-process rule engine — no subprocess, capped to an interactive byte budget so typing never waits.
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Format with Ctrl Shift F — the dialect-aware formatter, one undoable edit. Selection only, when there is one.
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Multi-statement scripts run statement by statement and stop at the first failure; earlier row-returning results stay stacked on screen.
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Auto-commit toggle — off, a tab runs inside one transaction with an “in transaction” pill; closing the tab rolls it back.
Appearance
The theme is the mode.
There is no dark-mode toggle in Sen — picking a theme switches the palette and the mode together. These swatches are real bundled themes. Click one: this whole page recolours, 3D scenes included.
Performance
Correct is not done.
Sen holds a smooth frame rate or it is broken. Anything that scales stays out of
render(); blocking reads go to the background executor; everything that can grow is virtualized.
- In-process enginetokenizer · splitter · analyzer · formatter · linter — no subprocess, interactive passes byte-capped
- Virtualized everythinggrids via a virtual table, the tree on borrowed ids — one element per visible row, never per item
- Display strings cached onceresult cells precompute their text off-thread; the common paint path is a refcount bump
- Never a blocked framekeyring, file writes, dialogs — all background spawns; a slow credential store can't stall a frame
Security & your data
Secrets in the keyring. Everything else in the open.
The SSL checkbox is honoured, not decorative: ticked means ssl_mode=require, and a server
that refuses TLS fails the connect instead of silently continuing in plaintext.
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Passwords only in the OS credential store — service
sen, one entry per connection. Never on disk in plaintext. -
Atomic persistence — tmp file + rename, and startup never blocks on a failed write.
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Errors you can act on — the SQLSTATE as a pill, the server's message, its
HINT:andDETAIL:lines intact.
connections.jsonconnection fields · no secretssettings.jsontheme · fonts · timeouthistory.jsonlevery statement + durationdrafts.jsonautosaved editor buffersOS credential storepasswords · service “sen”Download
Install Sen. Skip the toolchain.
A real installer — no Rust, no build steps, no runtime to fetch. First launch opens the connection manager; your passwords go to the OS keyring from day one.
Windows
SHA-256
e8869411e5cd92427303624234be615855ba052bd232394c75408b2bedccef1c
Unsigned build — SmartScreen may ask for “More info → Run anyway”.
Uninstalling preserves your data: connections, history and drafts stay
in %APPDATA%\sen, passwords stay in the OS keyring.
macOS
A .dmg ships once there is a Developer certificate to sign it with.
Linux
.deb and AppImage packages follow the same packaging pipeline.
Optional environment, after install
SEN_CONNECT_URLpostgres://user:password@host/db — auto-connect at startupSEN_CONFIG_DIRoverride the config directory