from Hacker News

HeidiSQL Available Also for Linux

by Daril on 5/29/25, 1:16 PM with 49 comments

  • by Daril on 5/29/25, 1:16 PM

    HeidiSQL is free software for people who work with databases, and aims to be intuitive to use. "Heidi" lets you connect to a variety of databases, like MariaDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Interbase and Firebird.

    Since some days it is finally available in a native Linux version. The code has been ported from Delphi to FreePascal / Lazarus.

  • by igitur on 6/2/25, 1:36 PM

    Long time user of HeidiSQL here. I respect the author a lot. He's been tirelessly working on this project for many years, mostly alone. Of course, that's due to the closed nature of Delphi.

    It's great news that this is now available for Linux, but the better news for me is that I can now build it on Lazarus / FreePascal. Even if it doesn't support all the features (eg MSSQL), at least I can now contribute fixes for some UI issues that have been bothering me.

    I can successfully build the FreePascal version on Windows and it runs... fine. Feels a little less snappy than the Delphi version and there are some UI padding issues. But it's a massive step in the right direction.

    If you can, please support this project, either financially or through code. contributions. IHMO what is dearly needed is for the different SQL dialects to be abstracted out properly. It's currently done in a bit of a crude way (no disrespect to the author) and it will require a big refactoring to get it right, but will open doors to more dialects.

  • by moron4hire on 6/2/25, 1:32 AM

    I'm curious if anyone here has any experience with DbBeaver and HeidiSQL and can make a comparison. I've been using DbBeaver for a while, but the interface is... strange. Will probably try Heidi tomorrow.

  • by atmanactive on 5/29/25, 11:43 PM

    Congrats on this. IMHO HeidiSQL is the best desktop SQL tool out there. Keep up the good work!

  • by redditor98654 on 6/2/25, 9:51 AM

    If you have the license for it, it is hard to beat Datagrip from Jetbrains. Support for just about any database and also integrated support for AI/Copilot making it much easier to write exploratory queries.

  • by sandreas on 6/2/25, 3:42 AM

    Thanks for Posting. I love to see Pascal Cross Platform Apps are possible.

    How does this compare with DbGate (https://github.com/dbgate/dbgate)?

  • by deergomoo on 6/2/25, 10:21 AM

    Heidi was the default option on our work machines a few years ago and it’s one of the buggiest pieces of software I’ve ever used.

    Does it still lock up the entire UI if a query takes longer than five seconds to return results? Does it still pop up exception dialogs every ten minutes when it’s been open for longer than a few hours?

  • by spapas82 on 6/2/25, 9:28 PM

    Heidi is the best gui for mysql/mariadb. It's really great and I don't change it with anything when i need to work on mysql servers.

    Unfortunately it's not that good on postgres or ms sql server. Feels more buggy and slow for these databases but I'm not sure if it's Heidi or the db drivers.

    I'm also one of the people that used heidi on Linux with wine (along with notepad++) so a native version is more than welcome!

  • by rd07 on 6/2/25, 4:33 PM

    I have wanted to try HeidiSQL before, but the lack of Linux version stopped me. Now, that it releases a Linux version, I think it is time to try it. Currently, I am using DbGate (daily) and DBeaver (occasionally). Feature-wise, DBeaver is better than DbGate, but it is slower than DbGate. Now let's see if Heidi is better than those two.

  • by sakesun on 6/2/25, 2:46 AM

    HeidiSQL, CudaText, Double Commander -- these native Pascal Apps still give the best user experience for me after decades.

  • by rorylaitila on 6/2/25, 10:36 PM

    I like how snappy and easy HeidiSQL is, I still use it when I need to manually twiddle some bit. But it's buggy and I don't write any SQL in it as I've lost enough code mid writing. DBeaver is my daily driver now.

  • by mappu on 6/2/25, 1:54 AM

    Heidi is the best, this is really wonderful. I had been using MeowSQL as an imitation client which was fine, but having the real HeidiSQL again is such a nice feeling.

    The deb package here didn't run for me on Debian 12 nor under distrobox Ubuntu, i think the dependency list needs a little attention, but that can be easily solved.

  • by Shorel on 6/2/25, 8:33 PM

    This is one of those programs that are so good and feature-rich that, even though I use Linux full time, I installed Wine to use the Windows version.

    No other Linux program has anywhere near half the features of HeidiSQL. Saying this is great news is an understatement.

  • by mohas on 6/2/25, 8:33 AM

    Heidi is one of the apps that I like so much it locked me to using windows

  • by CliffyA on 6/2/25, 3:02 AM

    Great news!

    I've missed Heidi after changing job and moving from MySQL to Mongo and then Linux many (many) years ago. Looking forward to see how it goes with Postgres and SQLite nowadays.

  • by devgoncalo on 6/2/25, 12:51 PM

    Great news. For me HeidiSQL has been one of my daily dev tools (since 2012?). I don't find it buggy, it's really fast and does the job really well.

  • by Grazester on 6/2/25, 10:03 PM

    I use Heidi SQL daily but then again if I had to do anything major I would return to MS SQL management studio. Heidi can be buggy at times.

  • by Zekio on 6/2/25, 3:33 PM

    HeidiSQL really brings me to back old school private servers for various games

  • by preezer on 6/2/25, 12:23 PM

    Very, very cool.

  • by racl101 on 6/2/25, 4:03 PM

    Pretty great program for Windows.