PoteNad

PoteNad is a small, native macOS plain-text editor inspired by classic Windows 10 Notepad. It focuses on creating and editing text files without Markdown, rich text, accounts, plugins, or built-in online services. PoteNad requires macOS 13 or newer and has no third-party application dependencies.

Install

Download PoteNad from GitHub Releases, or install it with Homebrew:

brew install --cask PoteNad/tap/potenad

Homebrew includes PoteNad in its normal brew upgrade cycle. To update only PoteNad, run brew upgrade --cask potenad.

The Homebrew cask verifies the app bundle and removes its quarantine attribute so PoteNad can open normally. Direct downloads are not Apple-notarized, so macOS may require Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security on first launch.

Features

• Familiar document actions including new windows and tabs, Open, Save, Save As, Revert, Duplicate, Rename, Move, Page Setup, and Print.
• Undo and redo, standard clipboard actions, text transformations, find and replace, Go to Line, Select Lines, and F5 Time/Date.
• .LOG timestamps when a file whose first line begins with .LOG is opened.
• Word wrapping, writing direction, font selection, zoom from 10–500%, and an optional status bar with line, column, character or word counts for the file or selection (click the count to choose), encoding, and line-ending information.
• UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16 LE/BE, Windows-1252, and Mac OS Roman text.
• Detection and preservation of LF, CRLF, and CR line endings, with encoding and line-ending choices in Save As.
• Native macOS menus, windows, tabs, settings, system/light/dark appearances, find bar, spelling, substitutions, speech, Services, autosave, recovery, optional previous-session restoration, document versions, and optional Apple Writing Tools that are off by default.
• Configurable page setup, printing, headers, and footers.

PoteNad uses standard AppKit controls so it feels at home on macOS while keeping the editor simple and distraction-free.

Build from source

Run the build script, then open the resulting app:

./scripts/build.sh
open build/PoteNad.app

The build is optimized and ad-hoc signed for the current Mac. Open Package.swift in Xcode to work on the source. Run ./scripts/check.sh to run the full local test suite.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.