TerseEditor is a native Mac editor for everyone who just wants to open a file. Instant cold start, paste that lands as clean plain text, syntax highlighting for 9 languages, and notes that save themselves. No account, no cloud, no price.
TerseEditor is written in Swift against native macOS text engines, so it behaves like a Mac app — and gets out of your way like a text field.
Double-click a file and it's already on screen. Native Swift and AppKit: no splash, no “loading workspace”, no extensions warming up.
Copy from any website or Word: non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters and smart quotes are stripped the moment text lands. What you keep is honest UTF-8 with LF endings.
Swift, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSON, HTML/XML, CSS, Shell, C/C++ and Rust — recognised by extension and by content, even inside a pasted note. Everything else opens as plain text: .txt .md .log .csv .ini .yaml .conf — if it's text, it opens.
A proper find bar with regex, whole-word and case toggles, a live match counter and one-undo Replace All. Plus line operations: move, duplicate, sort, dedupe.
Notes autosave as plain .txt files — point the folder at iCloud Drive and they follow you to the next Mac. Open files and tabs come back exactly as you left them.
Hit ⌃⌥⌘N in any app: a small panel floats up, you paste, press Esc — saved as a note. The fastest way to strip formatting from anything.
TerseEditor ships as one tiny universal binary that talks straight to macOS. That's why it launches instantly, sips battery, respects your system appearance, and never asks you to update a runtime.
Free while in beta — no account, no trial, no feature gates. If that ever changes, you'll hear about it long in advance.
No. It's an independent Mac app built from scratch in Swift, aimed at the same job: open any text file fast and edit it without ceremony.
macOS 14 Sonoma and later — one universal build for both Apple silicon and Intel Macs.
Expected for the beta — it isn't notarised yet. In the dialog click Done (not “Move to Trash”), then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click “Open Anyway”. macOS asks exactly once. A notarised build is on the way, and an App Store release will follow later.
Nothing leaves your machine. Notes are plain .txt files in a folder you choose; there are no analytics, no crash pings, no sync service. Air-gapped Macs welcome.
It isn't trying to. TerseEditor is the app you reach for between IDE sessions — configs, logs, snippets, that one file you need to fix right now.
Anything that's text — .txt .md .log .csv .json .html .yaml .ini .conf and source files in any language. TerseEditor reads UTF-8, UTF-16 and legacy Windows encodings (CP1251/1252) and always saves clean UTF-8. In Finder: right-click a file → Open With → TerseEditor.
Beta build, not yet notarised — macOS will ask you to allow it once in System Settings. Details in the FAQ.
Need the same kind of thing in a browser tab? HTTPTools is a free toolbox of web utilities — JSON formatter, base64, hashes and encoders — all running client-side, nothing uploaded.