Features

Everything NeatEdit does, and nothing it needs an account for.

Writing and tabs

• Native macOS window tabs (⌘T). Unsaved tabs survive quitting, with no “Save?” prompts.
• Files reopen where you left them, selection and scroll position included.
• Paste always inserts plain text at the caret. Text copied from a terminal, hard-wrapped at the window's width, is unwrapped back into paragraphs, while lists, headings, tables and code keep their lines. ⌘Z gives you the original.
• Duplicate a line (⌘D), move lines up and down (⌥↑ ⌥↓), and ⌥-drag for a column selection.

Find and replace

• Numbered placeholders: ★ adds a chip to Find that matches any text on the line, and the same number in Replace puts that text back.
• Match case, regular expressions with $1 templates, and search within the selection.
• Replace All is a single undo step.

Text commands

• UPPERCASE, lowercase and Title Case.
• Sort lines in natural order, remove duplicate or empty lines, trim trailing whitespace, join and unwrap lines.
• Tabs to spaces and back.
• Format and minify JSON; Base64 and URL encode and decode.

Large files and logs

• Files over 20 MB open in a read-only viewer that stays quick at hundreds of megabytes: select, copy, find, go to line, with line numbers.
• Follows a growing file like tail -f, in the viewer and the editor.
• Edit Lines (⌘⏎ or right-click): change a few lines of a huge file, written straight in between its untouched bytes, and only if those lines haven't changed on disk.

Files, faithfully

• Saved back in the original encoding, byte order mark and line endings.
• The status bar shows line, column, position, selection size, totals, encoding and line endings. Click to reopen in another encoding, or to convert between LF, CRLF and CR.
• A file changed on disk reloads quietly when it has no edits of yours; if it has, you choose what happens.
• Copy Path, Show in Finder and Print. The window shows which folder the file is in.

Looks

• Syntax highlighting for JSON, Markdown, PHP, JavaScript and TypeScript, Python, HTML and XML, CSS, Shell, YAML, SQL, Swift, C, C++, Java, C# and Go. Files over 2 MB stay plain.
• Line numbers, line wrapping, current line highlight and invisible characters, each with its own switch.
• Your choice of monospaced font and size. Light and dark, following your Mac.
• Available in 25 languages.

Open source

NeatEdit is free under the MIT licence, with no dependencies. The code is on GitHub.

Command line

NeatEdit ▸ Install Command Line Tool shows the one command that sets it up:

• neatedit notes.txt app.log opens files.
• some-command | neatedit - opens what a command prints.