A love letter to Notepad++,
reimagined for macOS.
For decades, developers and power users on Windows have relied on Notepad++ as their ultimate utility tool—a fast, lightweight editor that is absolutely dependable. It is the tool that never fails, never complains, and perfectly preserves your work.
Incise was born from a simple question: Why doesn't macOS have an editor with that same relentless reliability and speed?
Incise brings the best of that classic desktop philosophy to the Mac. It is a native Swift and Cocoa application, built for lightning-fast performance, wrapped in a premium Apple-centric visual aesthetic.
Core Philosophies & Features
Zero-Loss Session Recovery
Drafts are cached in real-time to disk. Quit the app, restart your Mac, or lose power—when Incise re-launches, your unsaved workspace is perfectly restored, exactly as you left it, with zero prompts or warnings.
Reopens Where You Left Off
Incise remembers which monitor it was on and returns there—not just the same coordinates—so multi-display and docking-station setups land exactly where you left them. Unplug that screen and it opens on an available one instead of off in the void, then moves itself back when you reconnect.
Native Performance & Scintilla
Powered by a customized native Scintilla engine, Incise handles large files without breaking a sweat, providing responsive syntax highlighting, code folding, and line navigation with zero UI lag.
Unified Editing Toolbar
A sleek, modern macOS-style unified titlebar and toolbar providing swift, physical access to actions like Find/Replace, Prettier formatting, Multi-tab navigation, and Sidebar toggles.
Real-Time Diff Layout
Compare your active edits with the saved version on disk instantly. Side-by-side differences are visualized natively, keeping you in complete control of your disk writes.
CSV & Data Tables
CSV, TSV, and fixed-width files open as a real editable grid—delimiter, header row, and column widths detected for you. Sort, filter, and tint cells by inferred type, then edit a cell and have just that field written back to the file. Convert between CSV, JSON, YAML, TOML, and Markdown tables in a click. More on data files.
Markdown, Aimed at Its Target
Split the editor with a rendered preview (⌘⌥P) and watch Markdown and HTML update as you type. Then pick the dialect you’re publishing to—Looker Markdown files, GitHub-Flavored, or CommonMark—and Incise flags anything that target won’t render, styles the source in place, and offers a visual editor bound to the same dialect.
Quick Open & Project Search
Jump to any file by fuzzy name with ⌘P, or search across every file in the folder with ⌘⇧F and click straight to the match. Finding your place stays instant, even in large trees.
Workspace File Tree
Open a whole folder in the sidebar and manage it without leaving the editor: drag files to move them, drag them out to the Finder, or send them to the Trash (⌘⌫). Distinct icons keep Markdown notes and READMEs easy to spot at a glance.
Multiple Cursors & Line Editing
⌘-click for extra cursors, select every occurrence of a word at once, or drag a rectangular column selection—then type once to change them all. Move, duplicate, and delete whole lines with a keystroke.
Git-Aware Workspace
See changes at a glance: the file tree tints modified and untracked files, a gutter marks added, changed, and deleted lines against HEAD as you type, and the status bar shows your branch and uncommitted count. (Homebrew edition.)
Integrated Terminal
Drop a real terminal below the editor with ⌃`, opening right in your project folder. Run several in tabs—each can take its own color scheme or match the editor theme—and they reopen when you relaunch. Only the Homebrew / direct-download edition includes it; the Mac App Store build can’t (Apple’s sandbox blocks an embedded terminal), so grab the free Homebrew or GitHub download if you want it.
Claude Code Integration
Run Claude Code in any terminal—Terminal.app, iTerm, or Incise’s built-in one—and type /ide to connect it to Incise. Claude sees your active file and selection, opens files on request, and proposes edits as a native diff you accept or reject—your editor stays the source of truth. Works in both the Mac App Store and Homebrew editions.
Any Agent, Over MCP
Incise is a Model Context Protocol server, so Antigravity, Codex, Cursor, and VS Code get those same abilities—open to a line, read the selection, list open tabs, propose a diff. It stays off until you switch it on, listens only on your own Mac, and requires a token unique to your install. How MCP works.