Getting started

Editing

Syntax highlighting is applied automatically from the file’s extension. To set it yourself, click the language name in the status bar (bottom-right) and pick from the list.

• Wrap long lines: View ▸ Wrap Lines (⌥⌘W), so paragraphs on a single line don’t scroll off-screen.
• Show whitespace: View ▸ Show Whitespace Characters reveals spaces, tabs, and line-ending marks.
• Fold code: click the gutter arrows, or Fold / Unfold All (⌘⌥[ / ⌘⌥]).
• Live preview: split the editor with a rendered preview of Markdown and HTML (⌘⌥P, or the toolbar button). It updates as you type, so a README sits beside its formatted output. To have Markdown or HTML files open with the preview already showing, turn it on in Settings ▸ Editor.
• Multiple cursors: ⌘-click to add a cursor anywhere; ⌘D selects the word at the cursor and adds the next occurrence each press, or ⌘⇧L selects them all at once. Type once to edit every selection. Hold ⌥ and drag for a column (rectangular) selection. Press Esc to collapse back to one cursor.
• Line operations: move the current line (or selected lines) with ⌥↑ / ⌥↓, duplicate it with ⇧⌥↓, or delete it with ⌘⇧K.
• Format a file: Edit ▸ Format Document (⌥⇧⌘F). Web files use the built-in Prettier; Python, Go, Rust, SQL, C-family, Swift and Perl use a formatter you install once. See installing formatters.
• Zoom: ⌘= / ⌘-, reset with ⌘0.

Clipboard history

Incise can remember what you copy in any app while it’s running: plain text, formatted text, and images. Turn it on in Settings ▸ Clipboard. The history stays on your Mac, keeping 100 clips and 20 images for 7 days unless you change the limits in the same pane. Nothing is recorded while recording is paused, or when an app marks a copy as private, as password managers do. To leave out an app’s copies, add it under Don’t record copies from in the same pane; Incise goes by the app in front when you copy.

• Paste from History: Edit ▸ Paste from History (⇧⌘V, or a shortcut you set in Settings ▸ Clipboard) opens a searchable list. Type to filter, ↑ / ↓ to move, Return to paste, and ⌥Return to paste as plain text. ⌘C copies a clip without pasting, and ⌘⌫ deletes it.
• Several at once: select clips with ⌘-click, ⇧-click, or ⇧↑ / ⇧↓. Each selected clip shows a number, and Return pastes them in that order, one per line, formatting included.
• Pinned clips: ⌘P pins the selected clips, or use Pin in a clip’s right-click menu; ⌘P again unpins them. Pinned clips stay at the top of the list and of the menu bar menu, are never removed by the limits, and survive Clear History.
• Quick paste: the first nine rows show ⌘1–⌘9. Press one to paste that row at once, or add ⌥ to paste it as plain text. Pinned clips come first, so they get the first numbers; typing a filter numbers the rows it shows.
• From any app: the same shortcut opens the list over whichever app you’re in. Choose a clip and it’s on the clipboard, ready for ⌘V. To have Incise paste it for you, turn on Paste directly into that app in Settings ▸ Clipboard; it needs the Accessibility permission, which the pane asks for. Some apps, Chrome and Slack among them, use ⇧⌘V for their own plain-text paste; pick another shortcut if you rely on that.
• Where the list opens: just below the text insertion point, or above it when there’s no room below. Over another app, Incise can find the insertion point only with the Accessibility permission (the one Paste directly uses); without it, the list opens at the mouse pointer. Drag its edges to resize it, its background to move it, and the divider to give the preview more room. Incise remembers the size.
• Screenshots into Claude Code: with Claude Code running in the built-in Terminal, choosing an image clip pastes it straight in (Incise sends ⌃V, the key Claude Code reads images with). Select several screenshots to send them one after another. With direct paste on, this works in Ghostty, Terminal, iTerm2 and other terminal apps too.
• Menu bar: a clipboard icon lists your pinned clips, then your 10 most recent; choose one to copy it (or paste it, with direct paste on). It also pauses recording and opens the full list. Settings ▸ Clipboard can hide it, and can open Incise at login, hidden, so your history is always being recorded.
• Paste and Match Style: Edit ▸ Paste and Match Style (⌥⇧⌘V) pastes without formatting.

Markdown

Markdown gets four things beyond syntax highlighting. All of them are off to the side of the plain text: the file on disk is always exactly what you typed.

• Rich styling in the source: View ▸ Rich Markdown Styling renders headings larger and bold, makes **bold** actually bold, tints code, and dims the syntax markers (#, **, backticks) so the prose stands out from its markup. On by default.
• Lint for a platform: Edit ▸ Lint Markdown for ▸ picks the dialect you’re writing for: Looker Markdown files, GitHub-Flavored, or CommonMark. Anything the target won’t render gets an amber squiggle; hover it to see why. Useful when a platform accepts only a subset. Looker text tiles, for one, have no strikethrough, nested lists, or image alt text. For a Markdown file, the status bar shows the profile in use; click it to change.
• Markdown Issues (⌘⇧M): lists every finding in the file; click one to jump straight to it.
• Visual editor: View ▸ Markdown Editor opens an editable, formatted view beside the source. It’s bound to the same dialect as the linter, so its toolbar and behaviour only offer what the target supports, and it writes that dialect’s exact syntax back. Your source file stays the record of truth; a document using something the visual editor can’t represent opens read-only rather than rewriting it. When that’s down to the profile (strikethrough under CommonMark, say), the notice names the profile and offers to switch to GitHub-Flavored.
• Copy as Markdown: copying in the visual editor puts Markdown on the clipboard (# Heading, **bold**), so pasting into the source pane, a terminal, or a chat keeps the formatting marks. Pasting back into the visual editor keeps the formatting itself.

CSV & data files

Open a .csv, .tsv, .tab, or other delimited file and Incise shows the raw text on the left and an editable table on the right. The delimiter, header row, and column widths are detected for you. Toggle the table with the grid button in the toolbar.

• Edit a cell: double-click it. The change is written back touching only that field; the rest of the file is left byte for byte as it was.
• Sort & filter: click a column to sort it as a view, then Apply Sort when you want the file itself reordered. Filter rows by value to narrow things down; the two compose.
• Color by type: numbers, dates, booleans, and text are tinted in both the grid and the raw text, so a stray value in a numeric column is obvious.
• Fixed-width files: column boundaries are detected automatically, and you can nudge, add, or remove them by hand when a file needs help.
• Convert: move a file between CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON Lines, YAML, TOML, JSON5, and Markdown or HTML tables in a click.

Only the rows on screen are parsed, so large exports and logs open and scroll without lag. There’s more detail on the CSV editor page.

Find & Replace

Open the find bar with ⌘F. Repeat a search with ⌘G (next) and ⌘⇧G (previous), even after the bar is closed, or load the current selection as the search term with ⌘E.

Toggle Match Case, Whole Word, and Regex (backreferences like \1 work in replacements). Replace All tells you how many matches it changed in the status bar.

Find in Files: press ⌘⇧F to search every file under the open folder. Results stream in grouped by file; click a match (or press Return) to jump to that line with the hit selected. The same Match Case / Whole Word / Regex toggles apply. Hidden files, binaries, and node_modules are skipped.

Navigating & files

• Quick Open: press ⌘P and type part of a file name to jump to any file in the open folder. Matching is fuzzy, so qoc finds QuickOpenController.swift. Use ↑ / ↓ to move and Return to open; Esc dismisses it.
• Organize the file tree: drag a file or folder onto another folder to move it, drag it out to the Finder, or drag it to the Dock’s Trash to delete it. Incise won’t let a drop overwrite an item already there or drop a folder inside itself.
• Select several items: Shift-click selects a range and ⌘-click adds or removes one, as in the Finder. Right-click the selection to open, reveal, copy the paths of, move or trash all of it at once, and drag it to move the whole selection.
• Change where the tree starts: Go ▸ Go Up moves the tree to the parent folder; to go back down, right-click any folder and choose Make Top Level.
• Copy a path: right-click a file or folder in the sidebar and choose Copy Path to put its full path on the clipboard as text.
• Move to Trash: select one or more files or folders in the sidebar and press ⌘⌫, the same shortcut the Finder uses. Incise asks first, and warns if any of them is open with unsaved edits.
• Go to line: ⌘L.
• Line endings & encoding: click the LF/CRLF and encoding items in the status bar to convert line endings, save with a different encoding, or reopen a file with the correct one.
• Revert to Saved: File ▸ Revert to Saved discards unsaved edits and reloads from disk.
• Compare With Saved (⌘⇧D): see your unsaved changes side-by-side against the file on disk.
• Full screen: ⌃⌘F.

Terminal & Claude Code

This edition of Incise (Homebrew / direct download) includes two developer features:

• Built-in Terminal: toggle it with ⌃` (or the toolbar button); new terminals open in the folder you have open. Cycle between terminal tabs with ⌘`, pick from 25 color schemes in Settings ▸ Terminal, and if an agent (like Claude Code) finishes or needs input in a background tab, that tab shows a dot, and you get a notification if Incise isn’t frontmost. Search the scrollback with ⌘F (match case, whole word, and regex; ⌘G for the next hit), and right-click for Copy, Paste, Rename Tab, Keep Current Title (so a name a program set, like Claude Code’s /rename, sticks), and Reset Terminal. More on the built-in terminal, including why the App Store edition doesn’t have one.
• Claude Code integration: connect Incise to Claude Code running on your Mac so it can see the file you’re editing and show its proposed edits as diffs in the editor.

Connecting Claude Code with /ide

1. In Incise, open the View menu and choose Enable Claude Code Integration, or turn on the same switch in Settings ▸ Agents.
2. Open a terminal running Claude Code. The built-in Terminal (⌃`) is the easiest, since it opens in your project folder, but any terminal where you run claude works too.
3. In Claude Code, type /ide and choose Incise from the list.
4. That’s it. Claude Code now sees your active file and selection, and the edits it proposes open in Incise as diffs you accept or reject.

More detail, including how the integration works under the hood, is on the /ide page, and in Claude Code’s IDE integration docs.

Requires Claude Code installed separately. Claude Code /ide also works on the Mac App Store edition, with a one-time Home-folder grant and an external terminal; only the built-in Terminal is Homebrew-only.

Other coding agents (MCP)

Incise is also an MCP server, so agents other than Claude Code (Antigravity, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Zed) can open files, read your current selection, list your open tabs, and show diffs you accept or reject in the editor.

1. Choose View ▸ Enable Agent Integration (MCP).
2. Open Settings ▸ Agents, pick your agent, and click Copy: the snippet already has your token in it, and the pane names the file it belongs in.

It stays off until you enable it, listens on 127.0.0.1 only, and requires a token unique to your install (regenerate it any time from the same pane). Full details, per-agent config, and what each tool does are on the MCP page. Works in both editions.

Accessibility

Incise is built to work with the macOS accessibility features in System Settings ▸ Accessibility:

• VoiceOver reads the editor contents, your selection, and the full interface: tabs, the file tree, the toolbar, and the status bar.
• Full keyboard control. Every command has a shortcut (see below), and the status-bar controls are focusable and operable without a mouse.
• Differentiate Without Color. The diff view marks changed lines with + and − symbols, not color alone, and a modified tab shows a ● dot, so state reads without color vision.
• Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast are respected: translucent surfaces become opaque and separators and diff highlights strengthen.
• Reduce Motion is honored by design: Incise uses no non-essential animation.
• Zoom the editor text with ⌘= / ⌘- / ⌘0, and Incise follows your Light / Dark / System appearance.

Something not working with your assistive setup? Let me know.

Keyboard shortcuts

New file

⌘N

Open file

⌘O

Open folder

⌘⌥O

Quick Open (fuzzy file finder)

⌘P

Save

⌘S

Save as

⌘⇧S

Print

⌘⇧P

Close tab

⌘W

Toggle sidebar

⌘⇧E

Next / previous tab

⌃Tab / ⌃⇧Tab

Select tab (9 = last)

⌘1–9

Find

⌘F

Find in Files

⌘⇧F

Find next / previous

⌘G / ⌘⇧G

Use selection for find

⌘E

Select next occurrence

⌘D

Select all occurrences

⌘⇧L

Paste from History

⇧⌘V

Paste and Match Style

⌥⇧⌘V

Move line up / down

⌥↑ / ⌥↓

Duplicate line

⇧⌥↓

Delete line

⌘⇧K

Next / previous tab in pane

⌘` / ⇧⌘`

Format document

⌥⇧⌘F

Go to line

⌘L

Compare with saved

⌘⇧D

Toggle Markdown / HTML preview

⌘⌥P

Move file to Trash (sidebar)

⌘⌫

Wrap lines

⌥⌘W

Zoom in / out

⌘= / ⌘-

Actual size

⌘0

Fold / unfold all

⌘⌥[ / ⌘⌥]

Enter full screen

⌃⌘F

Settings

⌘,

Still stuck? Contact support, or see what changed recently in the changelog.