Overview

Updated Nov 1, 2026

Textlane is a Rust-native replacement for unified: a pipeline that parses text into a syntax tree, runs plugins over it and serializes the result. The pipeline and its most expensive plugins run in Rust; existing JavaScript plugins can still take part, called only at the stage where they run.

Installation

cargo add textlane

It needs Rust 1.88 or later; each domain is a cargo feature, all on by default.

The Rust crate

cargo add textlane adds the crate that holds all of textlane's behaviour. It re-exports one crate per domain as a module of its name: textlane::md, textlane::html, textlane::mdx and textlane::nl. The npm package loads the same crate as a prebuilt native addon and the PyPI package as a prebuilt extension, so each language gets the same pipeline at the same version.

Conformance

Compatibility is defined by a language-neutral conformance suite: JSON cases, each naming a pipeline, an input and the expected output, ported from the upstream unified, remark, rehype, retext and MDX test suites. Every implementation runs the same cases.

Status

Textlane is pre-release. In Rust, Processor::new().with(plugin) builds a typed pipeline; the Node.js and Python packages drive textlane::Pipeline, which takes plugins by name with JSON options and follows unified's use, data and freeze. A binding adds its own functions as {host: id} descriptors: start_process and start_run pause before them with the tree as JSON, and Pause::resume goes on with the tree they returned.

Next steps

• Getting started — a first pipeline, syntax extensions and the result
• Processor — every method of the pipeline
• Recipes — pipelines for common jobs
• Markdown plugins, HTML plugins, MDX plugins and natural language plugins — each plugin and its options