MacPad

Ultra-fast native plain-text editor for macOS. No bloat.

MacPad family

• MacPad family website presents both apps.
• MacPad is the native macOS editor in this repository.
• MacPad Mobile is the native iPhone and iPad counterpart.

The apps are separate codebases and do not automatically synchronize open documents, tabs, settings, or recovery data. Files stored in a shared location can be opened explicitly from either app.

Download

Download the latest ready-to-use universal app:

Download the latest MacPad universal app

Unzip it and drag MacPad.app into Applications. The latest release page also provides release notes.

GitHub is the canonical download source. A synchronized mirror is available on SourceForge.

Each release includes a matching .sha256 checksum and GitHub build-provenance attestation.

If macOS warns that the app is from an unidentified developer, right-click MacPad.app, choose Open, then confirm Open. The app is locally signed but not Apple-notarized.

Latest Changes

1.3.0 adds an optional one-click menu-bar launcher, improves large-file editing responsiveness and coordinated saves, preserves mixed line endings, and makes session limits safely restorable.

See CHANGELOG.md for full release history.

Features

• Plain-text editing with native undo, cut, copy, paste, delete, and select all
• New, open, Open Recent, save, save as, and print
• Multiple windows, each with multiple tabs
• New tabs and new windows, including separate windows with their own tab groups
• Optional OFF-by-default menu-bar launcher for opening a new empty window with one click
• Session restore for window positions, selected tabs, tab groups, saved file tabs, and editor UI state without storing document text in preferences
• Unsaved-change prompts when closing or quitting
• Find, find next/previous, replace, and replace all with Match Case and Wrap Around options
• Standard shortcuts including Command-T for a new tab, Command-N for a new window, and Option-Command-F for Replace
• Go to line and insert current time/date
• Word wrap toggle
• App-wide persistent font chooser and per-tab zoom controls
• VoiceOver labels, stable accessibility identifiers, and predictable keyboard focus order
• Status bar showing line, column, zoom, line ending mode, and detected file encoding
• UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16 LE/BE, Windows-1252, and ISO-8859-1 detection, preservation, and Save As conversion
• Windows, Unix, classic Mac, and mixed line-ending detection and preservation
• Builds into a launchable universal MacPad.app
• Uses the included MacPad logo as the app icon

Build

./scripts/build-app.sh

The app bundle is created at:

build/MacPad.app

Launch it from Finder or with:

open build/MacPad.app

Install it into /Applications with:

./scripts/install-app.sh

Create a release zip with:

./scripts/package-release.sh

Run the automated suite with:

swift test

Community

• Read the wiki for usage details.
• Use Discussions for questions and ideas.
• Open an issue for a reproducible bug or focused feature request.
• See CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting a pull request.

License

MacPad is available under the Apache License 2.0.

Security

Report vulnerabilities through GitHub private vulnerability reporting. See SECURITY.md for policy details.