Plaintxt - a text editor that writes no editor code

They don't make them like Sublime anymore

Editors today are a div soup, a browser in a trench coat, or a subscription. Every one of them redraws the cursor by hand.

A text file is a string. Opening, saving, undo, selection, scrolling, dictation, VoiceOver: the OS already does all of that better than any JavaScript will. Plaintxt is that idea taken all the way. No web view. No rendering layer. Nothing between you and the file.

What it looks like

2 lines, 5 words, 25 chars

This is the real counter, running in your browser. Type anything.

Colour, and a little help

Open a Markdown file and headings, emphasis, links and code spans get colour. Open source code and keywords, strings, numbers and comments do. It is attributes on the same string in the same system text view, not a rendering layer. Plain text stays plain.

On the Mac, press ⌘↩ in a code file and Plaintxt asks a model running on your own machine (Ollama) to fill in at the cursor. Nothing leaves the computer. No Ollama, no harm done.

Settings are a text file. Launch Plaintxt with nothing to open and it opens plain.json: font size, monospaced, the completion model, and the five colours as hex. Edit, save, done. Like Sublime.

Agent IDE (Mac only)

Plaintxt on Mac is a minimalist IDE. Left sidebar lists files from your git repo. Click opens in a new tab. Center is the editor with syntax highlighting and format-on-save (prettier, black, swiftformat). Bottom tabs: chat with Ollama about your code, build output, and a terminal.

Chat includes file context automatically. Build and test buttons run Swift, Python tests in the output pane. Terminal runs shell commands. Nothing is saved remotely. Your machine, your agent, your code.

From the command line

One binary. It opens a file in the app, or counts it.

plain notes.txt          open in Plaintxt (.txt, .md, any code)
plain stat notes.txt     3 lines, 12 words, 71 chars
cat x | plain stat       counts from stdin

Everywhere you are

Mac

File browser, tabs, versions, autosave. Chat with your code. Build and terminal panes. Format on save.

iPhone & iPad

Any file in the Files app or iCloud Drive. Split view on iPad. Syntax highlighting everywhere.

Terminal

Build with one swiftc line. Stats mode counts lines, words, chars. No package manager, no runtime.

No accounts, no network

Plaintxt never talks to a server. There is nothing to sign into and nothing to collect. Your file is the only thing on disk.