What’s new

Bug-fix release.

• Diffs open at the change. A proposed change from Claude Code's /ide used to open at the top of the file, so an edit further down was off-screen and you had to hunt for it. The diff now opens at the first change with a few lines of context above it. Same fix applies to Compare with saved.
• Claude Code MCP setup prompt now handles the case where an incise server is already registered instead of failing.

Window and tab behaviour, mostly places where Incise quietly did nothing.

• ⌘-Tab back after closing the window now shows it again. Closing the last window leaves Incise running, which is correct — but ⌘-Tab brought the app forward showing nothing, and the Dock icon was the only way back. Minimised windows are deliberately left alone, since ⌘-Tab doesn't un-minimise on macOS.
• ⌘N, File ▸ Open, and Open Folder work with the window closed. They were adding tabs to an invisible window, so the command appeared to do nothing at all.
• New document tabs open on the right, matching the terminal tabs, Safari, Finder, and Xcode. They used to appear on the left.
• Right-click a folder in the file tree ▸ Make Top Level. Go ▸ Go Up had no counterpart, so returning to the folder you came from meant going through the Open Folder panel.

Terminal search, and two MCP fixes that matter if you use Incise with a coding agent.

Terminal

• Find in the scrollback — ⌘F in a terminal opens a find bar with Match Case, Whole Word, and Regex, the same three the editor's find has. ⌘G / ⌘⇧G step through matches, Esc closes. Options are remembered. It seeds from your selection, and a half-typed pattern says "Bad pattern" rather than pretending it found nothing.
• Copy on select (optional) — Settings ▸ Terminal. Off by default, since it replaces the clipboard as you drag.
• One right-click menu — Copy, Paste, Rename Tab, Terminal Theme, and Reset Terminal, from either the tab or the terminal body. macOS's AutoFill and Services entries no longer appear over a shell.

Fixes

• ⌘F now works in a terminal at all. The Find menu item was silently disabled whenever a terminal had focus.
• Esc closes the editor's find panel. It previously stayed open unless you clicked the close button.
• Opening a file leaves Terminal Only mode. Double-clicking a file in the tree used to open it into a hidden editor, so nothing appeared to happen.
• Settings panes no longer run off the bottom on a laptop screen.

Agents (MCP)

Both of these were found by running a real agent against Incise, and both stopped non-Claude agents from working properly:

• A tool name was illegal. incise/ping contained a slash, which MCP forbids — clients rejected it and could fail to register Incise's other tools along with it.
• Legacy clients were being refused. Any client declaring protocol 2025-06-18 or 2025-11-25 was held to 2026-07-28's stricter header rules and rejected outright.
• Tool descriptions now tell an agent when to show you a diff in the editor rather than writing the file behind your back.

Small release for agent setup.

• Copy Setup Prompt in Settings ▸ Agents — instead of pasting the MCP config into your agent's file yourself, copy an instruction you paste into the agent and let it merge the entry into its own config. Handy when that file already has servers in it, and it handles the cases a snippet can't: the file missing, holding comments, or carrying a stale incise entry.
• The prompt names the destination file, insists on a merge rather than an overwrite, and warns against the mistake that actually bites — an agent "correcting" Antigravity's serverUrl to url, which it rejects silently. Claude Code gets the CLI command instead of a file edit.
• Clearer wording on what the token in that prompt amounts to: it reaches the agent's model, which its config file would anyway, and it only opens the endpoint on 127.0.0.1.

Any coding agent can now drive Incise. Turn on View ▸ Enable Agent Integration (MCP) and Incise serves its editor tools — open a file, read the current selection, list open tabs and workspace folders, show a diff to accept or reject — over a local MCP endpoint that agents connect to directly. Settings ▸ Agents has the URL and copy-paste config for Claude Code, Antigravity, Codex, VS Code, Cursor, and anything else that speaks MCP over HTTP.

Previously only Claude Code could reach these tools, over a private WebSocket. That still works unchanged; this adds the standard transport alongside it, so Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, Zed and the rest get the same tools.

Off by default. When on, it listens on 127.0.0.1 only and requires a token that's unique to your install — regenerate it any time from Settings.

Also: drag tabs sideways to reorder them, in both the document and terminal tab strips (1.12.14).

Drag tabs to reorder them. Grab a tab and drag it sideways to put it where you want — in both the document tab strip and the terminal tab strip. Its neighbours slide out of the way as you go, and the order sticks across a relaunch.

Clicking a tab still just selects it: a drag only starts once the mouse actually moves, so nothing shifts by accident. Double-click on a terminal tab still toggles the panel, and Control-click still opens its rename/theme menu.

Markdown release: linting against a platform dialect, richer source styling, and a visual editor.

Markdown profiles + linter — Edit ▸ Lint Markdown for ▸ picks a target dialect (Looker Markdown files, GitHub-Flavored, CommonMark). Constructs the target won't render get an amber squiggle; hover one to see why. View ▸ Markdown Issues (⌘⇧M) lists every finding and jumps to it.

Rich Markdown styling — headings render larger and bold, bold is bold and italic italic, code sits on a faint slab, links are coloured, and the syntax markers (#, **, backticks, bullets) dim so prose stands out from its markup. View ▸ Rich Markdown Styling.

Visual Markdown editor — View ▸ Markdown Editor opens an editable pane beside the source, bound to the active profile: its schema, serializer, and toolbar all reflect the dialect, so it can only produce Markdown the target renders. The source file stays the record of truth. Documents using constructs it can't model open read-only rather than rewriting them.

Also — spell-check no longer flags URLs, autolinks, inline code, or link targets, and hovering a misspelling shows its corrections. The file tree's font setting is labelled more clearly.

New features + polish.

• File ▸ Copy File… — save a copy of the current file to a new location and open it in its own tab, keeping the original open and unchanged (unlike Save As, which retargets the tab). Defaults to the standard "<name> copy.<ext>" name next to the source.
• Drag-to-dock the terminal — grab the terminal's tab strip and drag it; the editor edge it'll snap to lights up; drop to re-dock (bottom/top/left/right). A direct-manipulation alternative to the Terminal Position menu.
• Type coloring now colors the raw text too — the CSV table's "color by type" toggle recolors the underlying text view to match the grid, not just the grid.
• Fixed: the table/preview toolbar toggle now reflects a view restored from saved state on open (it could show off while the pane was showing).

Large-file performance.

• CSV table on huge files — the table's row index now scans by byte instead of character, making the boundary scan ~10× faster (on a 1.3 GB / 2.85M-row file, ~16 s → ~1.6 s to build). Row-click now selects the record's exact span, and cell edits no longer re-materialize the whole buffer.
• Opening large files — the git change-gutter no longer reads the entire buffer before deciding to skip large files, and it did so on every git refresh. On a 1.3 GB file this removes a repeated multi-GB read that pinned the CPU and thrashed memory for the better part of a minute after open. (Fixes a small tax that was present on every file's open, just invisible on small ones.)

CSV table power features + polish.

• Type-aware coloring — a paint-palette toggle in the table chrome colors cells by inferred type (number / date / boolean / text), mapped to your editor theme's syntax colors. Off by default; persists across files.
• Big-file streaming — the table's row index no longer materializes the whole file as a character array, sharply cutting memory on large CSVs (a 100 MB file no longer costs ~1.6 GB just to index).
• Fixed-width boundary editing — for fixed-width files, a "Columns at:" field lets you nudge / add / remove the detected column boundaries; persists per file.
• Terminal: the window title shows the active terminal's name when no document is open.
• Tabs: the "+" is spaced correctly when no document is open.

New: Data conversion.

• Edit ▸ Convert Data To ▸ … converts the current data file between formats, opening the result in a new tab. Tabular: CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON Lines, Markdown table, HTML table. Structured: JSON, YAML, TOML, JSON5. The menu lists only the targets valid for the file you have open, and warns before a conversion that would drop comments. Everything runs in-process.
• Terminal: when no document is open, the window title now shows the active terminal's name.
• Tabs: the "+" is spaced correctly when no document is open.

UI polish release.

• Terminal tab strip: first tab sits flush-left and the resize handle no longer overlaps the tab; tab metrics aligned with the document tab strip.
• File tree sidebar: removed the permanent legacy-scroller gutter (the grey band beside the split divider) by pinning overlay scrollers, so the tree uses the full width and the scroller floats/auto-hides.

Bug-fix release.

• Fixed Claude Code /ide integration: connections were failing with "Failed to connect" because the WebSocket handshake didn't echo the mcp subprotocol that Claude Code 2.1.x now requires. It connects again. (#75)

Terminal layout flexibility.

• Terminal Only mode: hide the editor so the terminal fills the pane (View → Terminal Only, ⌃⌥`)
• Dock the terminal to any edge — Bottom / Top / Left / Right (View → Terminal Position), each freely resizable and remembered across launches
• Terminal tabs: sticky manual rename that overrides shell titles (right-click a tab → Rename Tab…)
• Window title follows the active terminal in Terminal Only mode
• Polish: removed a stray scrollbar bar on the terminal's right edge

CSV table view gains editing + sort/filter, plus editor and terminal polish.

• CSV in-grid editing: edit cells directly in the table view; changes write back to the file (RFC 4180-quoted), with undo/redo. Double-click anywhere in a cell to edit; column separators added.
• CSV sort & filter: click a header to sort (numeric-aware), or filter rows with the search box — both view-only, with an 'Apply Sort' to persist the order (undoable).
• Per-file view memory now also remembers the Markdown/HTML preview pane + split.
• Terminal: a little left padding so text isn't jammed against the edge.
• Renamed the terminal 'Match Editor' theme to 'Follow Editor Theme'; the theme preview uses your real login name.

Two new editor features.

• Inline spell-check for prose (Markdown, plain text): red squiggles as you type, right-click for suggestions / Learn / Ignore. On by default; toggle in Preferences.
• Per-file view memory: CSV table view now remembers how you left each file — table open/closed, delimiter, split position, and column widths — restored when you reopen it.

Adds XML formatting.

• Format Document (⌥⇧⌘F) now reflows XML/SVG/XSL/XSD via a bundled Prettier XML plugin — no toolchain to install.

Bug-fix release.

• Fix phantom horizontal scrollbars in the CSV table view and editor pane (appeared when a mouse was connected / always-visible scrollbars are in use).
• Fix the editor/table split ratio being forgotten when toggling the view or switching tabs.
• Fix the preview-toggle button state not matching the active pane.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash when reopening Quick Open (⌘P). Opening the file finder a second time — after it had shown results and been dismissed — could crash the app. Quick Open now reopens reliably.

Remembers which monitor it was on

• Incise now reopens on the same display it was closed on, not just the same coordinates — so a multi-monitor or docking-station setup lands the window where you left it.
• The window is remembered against each display's hardware identity, so it still restores correctly after you re-dock or rearrange your monitors in System Settings (where the same screen can come back at different coordinates).
• If that display isn't connected, Incise opens centered on an available screen instead of off in empty space — and it remembers the original spot, so when you reconnect the monitor the window moves itself back automatically.
• A window maximized on a disconnected high-res display reopens sized to fit whatever screen is available.

Per-terminal color schemes

• Right-click a terminal tab ▸ Theme to give that one terminal its own scheme. Each tab paints in the scheme its terminal is running — including when it's inactive — so a strip of terminals is colour-coded at a glance, and the panel chrome follows whichever is active.
• "Match Default" puts a tab back on the global preference and keeps following it, so changing Preferences ▸ Terminal ▸ Theme still moves every terminal you haven't given an explicit scheme.
• Your terminals' schemes survive a quit. (They still reopen as fresh shells at the project root — history and working directory aren't restored.)

Redesigned tabs, everywhere

• Document tabs now match the terminal's: Chrome-style folder tabs with flared corners, drawn in the editor theme's own colours — the active tab is the editor background rather than a system-accent blue floating over the text. The strip follows the theme, which it never did before.
• The + button sits beside the tabs (bare +, green on hover) instead of pinned to the far right, and the × on every tab lights up as you point at it.
• Tighter, quieter chrome: half the dead space above both strips, matching separator rails, rounded top corners, and a 4pt split divider that matches the terminal's resize handle.
• Dark mode fix: tabs were nearly invisible against the strip on a dark theme — the shading was a percentage, which is a plain grey against white but almost nothing against a dark background. Every theme now gets the same visible separation.

Toolbar

• New light/dark appearance switch — a moon while light, a sun while dark.
• Compare, Preview and Terminal now show their on/off state, like Wrap already did. Compare is also a toggle: clicking it again closes the diff.

Fixes

• The diff's header bar could be left black under a light theme after a session that had been in dark; it now follows the theme.
• .md files get their own icon in the file tree.

Fixes

• Dragging a file out of the sidebar now works. In 1.10.0 you could drag files within the tree, but dragging one out to the Finder or the Dock's Trash did nothing — the drag was never published to other apps, so the Trash wouldn't even highlight. Dropping on the Trash now moves the file there.

1.10.0's release notes advertised this; it did not work in that build. 1.10.1 supersedes it — please upgrade.

Everything from 1.10.0

• Redesigned terminal tabs — Chrome-style tabs with the close button inside the tab, an accent-tinted active tab, and a hover-reveal ×.
• New-terminal button — a clean + that lights up on hover, at the end of the tab strip.
• Smarter ⌘N — when a terminal is focused, ⌘N opens another terminal at the active session's current directory instead of a new document.
• File-tree drag & drop — drag files/folders onto a folder to move them, or out to Finder / the Trash.
• ⌘⌫ to Trash — move the selected file/folder to the Trash from the tree (Finder's shortcut).
• Markdown icon — .md files now get their own distinct icon in the tree.

> ⚠️ Superseded by [1.10.1](https://github.com/Incise-App/homebrew-tap/releases/tag/v1.10.1) — please upgrade. > The "drag out to Finder / the Trash" item below does not work in this build: the drag was never published to other apps, so the Trash wouldn't even highlight. Fixed in 1.10.1. Dragging within the tree works fine here.

What's new in 1.10.0

• Redesigned terminal tabs — Chrome-style tabs with the close button inside the tab, an accent-tinted active tab, and a hover-reveal ×.
• New-terminal button — a clean + that lights up on hover, at the end of the tab strip.
• Smarter ⌘N — when a terminal is focused, ⌘N opens another terminal at the active session's current directory instead of a new document.
• File-tree drag & drop — drag files/folders onto a folder to move them. (Dragging out to Finder/Trash is broken in this build — fixed in 1.10.1.)
• ⌘⌫ to Trash — move the selected file/folder to the Trash from the tree (Finder's shortcut).
• Markdown icon — .md files now get their own distinct icon in the tree.

Terminal

• Trackpad scrollback now works. SwiftTerm keys off the legacy deltaY, which is always 0 for precise trackpad scrolling — so two-finger scrolling was silently dropped and you could not scroll back through history at all. Scrollback also raised from 500 to 10,000 lines.

Claude Code /ide

• Accept / Reject in the diff view now actually works. Incise was replying in a shape Claude Code discards, so it threw the answer away and fell back to asking in the terminal — clicking Accept or Reject did nothing.
• The diff scrolls to the change. It used to always open at line 0, so an edit further down the file was off-screen.
• Switching tabs updates the selection. /ide used to keep reporting the selection from the tab you left.

Under the hood

• Swift 6 language mode. Data races in Incise's own code are now build errors rather than warnings. This caught a real race in the /ide WebSocket server (a callback written on the main thread and read from the server queue) and 18 latent main-thread violations in the terminal.

Mac App Store build (not in this DMG)

• Sandbox folder grants now accumulate instead of silently revoking each other, and first launch no longer opens a file dialog before the window appears.

Incise 1.9.2 — a small polish release.

About window, readable on any display — the About screen is redesigned so it stays legible on high-resolution (4K) monitors running at a native resolution, where the old standard panel rendered uncomfortably small. Larger app name, version, and credits, with proper link cursors.

The sidebar remembers its width — drag the file-browser sidebar to the width you like and it now persists across launches instead of resetting every time. It also opens a bit wider by default.

Incise 1.9.1 — a bug-fix and polish release.

Terminal color schemes, reworked — the color scheme picker is now a scrollable list with a live preview, so you can see a theme (sample output, selection, cursor, and all 16 ANSI colors) before applying it. The catalog grows from 11 to 25 curated themes, adding GitHub Dark, Ayu (Dark + Mirage), Night Owl, Cobalt2, Snazzy, Monokai Pro, Kanagawa Wave, Rosé Pine Moon, Everforest, Tokyo Night Storm, Iceberg, Material Darker, and Gruvbox Material. Palettes come straight from the canonical iTerm2-Color-Schemes source.

Deleting an open file behaves sensibly — moving an open file to the Trash (or deleting it from another app) no longer leaves the tab stuck behind a dead-end "Reload" prompt. A tab with no unsaved changes closes on its own; a tab with unsaved edits stays open with a Save to Recreate option so you never lose work.

Formatter detection fixed — formatters installed with pyenv, pipx, conda, or into ~/.local/bin (such as sqlfluff) are now found, instead of showing as unavailable in Settings → Formatter when they were installed all along.

_The integrated terminal and its themes are part of this Homebrew / Developer-ID edition; the Mac App Store edition has the file-deletion and formatter fixes._

Quick Open — press ⌘P and type part of a file name to jump to any file under the open folder. Matching is fuzzy, so qoc finds QuickOpenController.swift; ↑/↓ to move, Return to open (Print moved to ⇧⌘P).

Git awareness — the file tree tints changed, untracked, and conflicted files; a change-bar gutter marks added/modified/deleted lines against HEAD as you edit; and the status bar shows the current branch with a dirty-file count.

Multiple cursors & column selection — ⌘-click to add a cursor anywhere and type once to edit every spot; ⌘D selects the word and adds the next match per press, ⇧⌘L selects them all; hold ⌥ and drag for a rectangular (column) selection.

Line operations — move the current line (or selected lines) with ⌥↑ / ⌥↓, duplicate with ⇧⌥↓, delete with ⌘⇧K.

File-tree fixes — case-only renames (readme → README) now work, and the rename box pre-selects the name without its extension, like Finder.

_Git awareness and the built-in Terminal are in this Homebrew / Developer-ID edition; the Mac App Store edition has Quick Open, multiple cursors, line operations, and the rename fixes._

Find in Files: ⌘⇧F searches every file under the open folder, with streaming results and click-to-jump (Format Document moved to ⌥⇧⌘F). ⌘ / ⇧⌘ cycle tabs in the focused pane — documents in the editor, sessions in the terminal. Terminal upgrades: agent-attention notifications (a bell from a background tab badges the tab, sets a dock badge, and posts a clickable notification — pairs perfectly with Claude Code), plus 7 new color schemes (One Dark, Nord, Gruvbox Dark, Catppuccin Mocha, Tokyo Night, Monokai, GitHub Light).

Accessibility update: VoiceOver reads the editor and full UI, the diff view marks changes with +/- symbols (not color alone), and Incise honors Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Reduce Motion. Includes the 1.6 feature series — soft word wrap, Go to Line, whole-word find, per-file line-endings/encoding, tab switching, drag-to-open, Revert to Saved, and a customizable toolbar.

A big usability release focused on native macOS conventions.

New

• Soft word wrap — View ▸ Wrap Lines (⌥⌘W)
• Go to Line (⌘L) and Show Invisibles (whitespace + line-ending marks)
• Line endings & encoding controls in the status bar — convert LF/CRLF/CR, save-with or reopen-with a specific encoding
• Keyboard tab switching — ⌃Tab / ⌃⇧Tab and ⌘1–9
• Drag files onto the window to open them
• Find Next / Previous (⌘G / ⌘⇧G), Use Selection for Find (⌘E), Whole Word, and search feedback
• Help menu with online help, Enter Full Screen (⌃⌘F), Revert to Saved, Customize Toolbar
• Empty-state view and a Dock menu

Improved

• The title bar now shows the active file, its proxy icon, and the edited dot
• Prompts to save named files on quit; save dialogs are now sheets instead of app-blocking modals
• Accessibility: the status-bar controls are keyboard-reachable and VoiceOver-labeled

Fixed

• Replace All now honors Match Case / Regex, and regex backreferences (\1) work
• The editor inserts spaces to match the status bar, and new files default to LF line endings

Requires macOS Ventura (13) or later.

Incise 1.5.2 (build 32)

• Window ▸ Show Main Window (⇧⌘0): reopen the main window after closing it
• Terminal: new terminals open at the file-tree root; added a toolbar button to toggle the terminal
• Go menu: Home/Desktop/Documents now resolve to your real home folder
• Various fixes

Fixed & improved:

• File Tree font picker now opens on the actual current font/size (no more "System 12" mismatch)
• Sidebar can be dragged up to ~50% of the window width
• Terminal panel can be dragged up to ~80% of the window height

Update with brew upgrade --cask incise.

New & fixed:

• Terminal color schemes (Solarized, Dracula, Tomorrow Night) + independent terminal font
• Independent File Tree font setting
• Fixed: unreadable inactive tabs in Dark Mode
• Fixed: leftover tab artifact after closing the last terminal
• Clearer "+ New File" tab button

Update with brew upgrade --cask incise.

New: incise command-line launcher.

• incise — open the current directory as a workspace
• incise <folder> — open a folder
• incise <file> — open a file and reveal its folder in the tree

Installed automatically by the Homebrew cask (symlinked into your PATH). Update with brew upgrade --cask incise.

Incise 1.3.0

New: file-management context menu in the file tree. Right-click any file or folder for:

• Open · Open with Default App · Reveal in Finder
• Rename… · Move to…
• Get Info
• Move to Trash

Fixed: removed a thin black outline along the app icon's straight edges.

Notarized Developer ID build. brew upgrade --cask incise to update.

Maintenance release with several editor fixes (also the basis of the first Mac App Store submission).

• Real line-level diff — Compare with Saved now shows a precise per-line diff instead of marking the whole file changed.
• Undo fix — undoing past the start no longer blanks the document; Undo/Redo correctly enable/disable.
• Syntax highlighting for `.jsx` and `.tsx`.
• Font panel in Preferences now appears beside the settings window instead of a screen corner.

Developer ID build — includes the embedded terminal and Claude Code /ide integration.

Incise 1.2.1 — Terminal UX + document tree

• Resizable terminal panel — drag the top edge of the terminal to change its height.
• Collapse to a tab strip — toggling the terminal (or double-clicking its tab / strip) now collapses it to a docked strip you can double-click to reopen, instead of vanishing. The shell stays alive across collapse. ⌃` still toggles.
• Document tree: non-text files (PDFs, images, binaries) now open with the system default app (Finder-like) instead of as garbled text; text files still open in the editor.
• Claude Code `/ide`: added the getDiagnostics tool, completing the /ide protocol surface.

Developer-ID notarized. macOS 13 (Ventura)+.

Incise 1.2.0 — Embedded Terminal

Adds a built-in terminal panel (#21):

• Tabbed, collapsible bottom terminal panel — multiple sessions, each a login shell with your real PATH/environment.
• Toggle Terminal (⌃\) and **New Terminal** (⌃⇧\) in the View menu.
• Open Terminal Here — right-click a folder in the file tree to open a session there.
• Theme-matched (follows the editor's light/dark theme); panel open/size and tab count persist across relaunch.
• Run Claude Code inside a session and type /ide to connect it to Incise (active file/selection, file opens, accept/reject diffs).

Developer-ID notarized build. macOS 13 (Ventura) or later.

New: Claude Code `/ide` integration

Incise now connects to Claude Code via /ide. Run claude in your project folder, then /ide and select Incise:

• Claude automatically sees your active file + selection.
• It can open files in the editor (with line selection).
• Its edits arrive as a diff you accept or reject — Accept writes + saves, Reject discards.

Runs on this Developer-ID build with no setup. Notarized Developer ID.

(Also in recent builds: new app icon, the Go menu, and Show Hidden Files.)

Changed

• App icon refined: full-frame rounded tile with transparent corners (renders cleanly in the Dock/Finder).

Notarized Developer ID build.