Getting started

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 invisibles — View ▸ Show Invisibles 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.
• 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.
• Zoom — ⌘= / ⌘-, reset with ⌘0.

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 have no strikethrough, nested lists, or image alt text.
• 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.

Open a .csv, .tsv, 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.

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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Move to Trash — select a file or folder in the sidebar and press ⌘⌫, the same shortcut the Finder uses. Incise asks first, and warns if the file 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.

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.

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

• VoiceOverreads 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 Motionis 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.