Changelog

Dark-mode text that reads as ink rather than glare, a terminal that stays where you left it, and tab names that use the room they have.

Dark mode

• Editor text steps off pure white. Off white, but only just — enough that the page reads as ink on a dark surface instead of light pointed at you.
• Increase Contrast puts the white straight back, so nothing is dimmer for anyone who asked the system for more contrast.

Terminal

• The terminal keeps its place when the sidebar opens or closes, instead of the content jumping under you.

Tabs

• A tab name is now shortened only when the tab itself runs out of room. A terminal tab used to lose the end of its name after 28 characters no matter how much space was going spare — and once shortened, it stayed that way.
• Tabs grow wider for a long name when the strip has room. A crowded strip still shares the space out evenly, as before.

Scrolling and layout bugs in large or wrapped files, a clearer active file in the sidebar, and the iCloud folder ready as soon as Textful opens.

Editor

• The padding under the last line is no longer somewhere you can scroll to.
• Wrapped files keep their layout when the editor tiles, instead of throwing it away and redrawing from scratch.
• Tiling and the line-number gutter no longer feed each other in a loop.

Sidebar

• The open file is highlighted with the selection pill.
• That pill only shows while the tree has focus, so it does not fight the editor selection.
• Opening a file from the tree reuses a clean active tab instead of stacking another one.

iCloud

• The Textful folder in iCloud Drive is created on launch, not only when you open a vault.
• The folder carries the Textful logo on the Finder shelf.

Updates

• Textful checks for updates every time it launches.

Pictures and PDFs open in place, your last session comes back when you relaunch, and the terminal and file tree both got a lot more useful.

Pictures, clips, and PDFs

• Open an image, a video clip, or a PDF in the same place the editor would be — Textful shows it instead of refusing a binary.
• SVG opens as a picture with ⇧⌘M and stays editable as source when you want the markup.
• Images, clips, and PDFs show up in the file tree and in Go to File, and an asset tab you had open comes back after a quit.

Coming back to where you left off

• Relaunch and the windows, tabs, and panes you were in are still there.
• Closing a tab or a window, or quitting, no longer asks about every unsaved buffer — what was in it is kept for you.

Terminal

• Much more scrollback, so a long build log is still reachable from the top.
• Find searches the focused terminal's scrollback instead of doing nothing.
• ⌘K clears the screen but leaves a live prompt behind.
• A split terminal opens where the pane it came from is standing.
• New Terminal Here on a folder in the file tree's right-click menu.
• Custom titles on terminal tabs, drag-reorder for sessions, and a dock that shows and hides instantly.

File tree and vaults

• Full keyboard navigation in the tree, with empty folders that say why they are empty.
• Drag files into folders, reorder pinned files, and confirm before a vault is taken off the list.
• A rail marks the open file instead of a full-row selection.

Editing, find, and large files

• Find-as-you-type is debounced and only paints the matches you can see; ⌘G continues from the caret.
• Files that are too large to hold refuse to open cleanly, and scans that used to walk the whole buffer are bounded.
• Jumping to a line lays out only enough of the document to centre it, so big files stop hitching.
• Saving over a file that changed on disk asks first; external changes are polled off the main thread.

Settings and chrome

• The Editor settings pane has a section list; status bar extras sit under a language + more menu.
• Keyboard focus is visible in the chrome; the caret and selection follow the system appearance.
• Motion for the drawer, find bar, and overlays shares one reduce-motion-aware path.

The first public beta. Textful is a text editor for macOS — for the .txt files, Markdown notes, and code you already keep in a folder.

Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal binary for Apple silicon and Intel.

Windows, tabs, and panes

• Reopen the tab you just closed, close the other tabs, close them all, or save every open file at once.
• Split a pane right or down and nest as far as you like, moving focus between them from the keyboard.
• Drag a tab to another pane, to another window, or out into a window of its own.
• A window whose last tab closes keeps a fresh untitled buffer rather than an empty gray rectangle, and an unsaved buffer takes its title from its first line.

Vaults and the sidebar

• Vaults — a saved list of the folders you actually work in, built by hand and never by accident, with a switcher that opens over the editor. Making one asks for a name and a place; iCloud Drive is offered as that place, and iCloud paths are named "iCloud Drive" rather than the folder they really are.
• A sidebar file tree, with an icon and a tint per file type. Make a file or folder, rename one in place, move one to the Trash, reveal it in Finder, or copy its path — and a rename takes its open tab, its pin, and its vault entry with it.
• Pinned files, scoped to the vault, so each project shows its own.
• Reveal the file you are editing in the tree, which stays live while Textful is frontmost. Dotfiles stay out of it until you ask for them, and are found by search regardless.
• Opening a folder gives it a window; opening a file puts it in the window its vault owns. Save panels open in the vault, or beside the file being saved.
• The sidebar can sit on either side.
• Vaults are optional — Textful opens a single file with no vault and no folder at all, the way any other editor would.

Finding your way around

• Go to anything — one panel for files, for line numbers, for headings and definitions, for text in the file you are in, and for its bookmarks. It moves as you type, esc puts you back, and README:10 opens a file and lands on the line.
• A command palette for everything in the menu bar.
• Find and replace in the file, with case, whole-word, and regex — and across the whole folder, with the results in the sidebar.
• Bookmarks — mark the lines you have to come back to, see them beside the line numbers, step between them, or put a cursor on every one at once.

Editing

• Multiple cursors — collect the next occurrence of a word and rename them all at once, ⌘-click for a caret anywhere, ⌥-drag a rectangle for a column of them, or split a selection into one cursor per line.
• Line commands — move and duplicate lines, open one above or below without reaching for Home or End, and copy or cut the whole line when nothing is selected.
• Comment out a line, or a block.
• Brackets and quotes pair as you type, on Sublime's conditions, so don't survives it. The pair at the caret is boxed and an unmatched one flagged in red.
• Convert case — upper, lower, title, swap, and between camelCase, snake_case, and kebab-case.
• Sort and permute lines — in order and naturally enough that item2 comes before item10, or reversed, deduplicated, or shuffled.
• Folding — collapse an indented block, or a Markdown heading's whole section, with clickable triangles in the gutter.
• Indentation — tabs or spaces per file, guessed when the file opens, so a Makefile keeps its hard tabs and a four-space file stays four. Convert a whole file either way in one undo, indent and unindent a block, and let Return carry the line's indentation down with it.
• Trailing whitespace trimmed on every save, so files come out clean unasked — sparing the line your caret is on, so saving mid-sentence doesn't take back the space you just typed.

Reading

• Syntax highlighting — the language comes from the filename, the extension, or the #! line, so a Makefile or an extensionless #!/bin/bash script is colored with nothing asked of you; say otherwise for any one file from the status bar. Scala, Dart, Haskell, Clojure, and Zig are included, which the common bundle has no grammar for.
• Markdown preview — headings, lists, tables, quotes, links, and syntax-highlighted fenced code in place of the source. Task lists become checkboxes you can tick from the preview itself, ticking one writes the file, and toggling the preview keeps your place.
• Word wrap, a line-number gutter, indent guides, an adjustable line height, and a band behind the line you are on.
• Visible whitespace inside a selection — dots for spaces, dashes for tabs.

Files that change on disk

• Files are reconciled when Textful returns to focus and while it is frontmost: reloaded as an undoable edit, or held back and queried if you have unsaved work. A file deleted underneath the editor is marked on its tab.
• Revert to Saved on a file you have not touched.

Encodings and line endings

• A file is written back in the encoding and with the line endings it arrived in, both named in the status bar. UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 are recognized from what the file itself says; anything else that is still text is read as Windows-1252, and the bytes you did not touch come back exactly as they were. A binary file refuses to open rather than appearing as nonsense.
• Change either one from the status bar or the menus: write the file out as something else, read the same bytes again through a different alphabet — the way back from a file that opened as mojibake — or switch between Windows, Unix, and Mac OS 9 line endings.
• Typing something the file's encoding cannot spell, an emoji into a Windows-1252 file say, stops the save and offers UTF-8 instead. Nothing is ever written lossily.

The status bar

Where the caret is — or, while you drag, how many lines, words, and characters are selected — alongside what undo would reverse, the file's language, its indentation, its encoding and line endings, whether word wrap is on, and whether the open folder is a vault. In a file you write rather than program, a word count rides along: the document's, or the selection's once there is one. The sidebar toggle sits on the side the sidebar is on.

Settings and the rest

• Theme — Light, Dark, or System, so Textful follows the desktop into dark.
• Separate fonts for prose and code, font size controls, and an interface size that scales the chrome around the editor without touching the text you are reading.
• Line numbers, word wrap, syntax highlighting, current-line highlighting, bracket matching, auto-pairing, tab width, and trimming on save are all switches in Settings rather than decisions made for you.
• Custom shortcuts — put any command on any chord; a chord another command already holds is a question rather than a silent shadowing. The list is generated from the menu bar, so it is never stale, and it is driven from the keyboard and spoken to VoiceOver.
• Apple Intelligence — Writing Tools, Speech, and Spelling and Grammar, borrowed from macOS and searchable from the palette.
• A terminal drawer — several sessions in the window you are already in.
• Printing — the file on paper, wrapped to the page and breaking between lines, with its name and the page number in the margins.
• A command line — install the textful command from the menu, then textful notes.txt or textful . from a terminal.
• Send feedback — Help ▸ Send Feedback… or Report a Bug… opens a form that posts from the app, with version and system already filled in.
• Automatic updates — Textful checks for a new build every six hours and updates itself in place.
• Third-party license notices under Settings ▸ About.