Help

Getting started

Incise is a fast, native macOS text editor. Open a file with ⌘O or by dragging it onto the window; open a whole project with File ▸ Open Folder (⌘⌥O) to browse it in the sidebar. New documents open in tabs across the top.

Your work is never lost. Incise continuously caches everything to disk, so you can quit (or lose power) without saving. On relaunch, every tab is restored exactly as you left it: cursor position, scroll, encoding, and even documents you never saved. The window itself reopens on the display it was on; if that monitor has been disconnected, it opens on an available screen instead, returning home when you reconnect it. Quitting asks about unsaved changes; turn off Ask to save unsaved documents when quitting in Settings ▸ Editor and Incise quits straight away, bringing them back next time.

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. 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, it 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.
Menu bar: a clipboard icon lists your pinned clips, then your 10 most recent; choose one to copy it. 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.

Claude Code & Terminal

Claude Code works with this edition. Turn on Enable Claude Code Integration in the View menu or in Settings ▸ Agents (it asks once for access to your Home folder), then run Claude Code in a terminal and connect with /ide. Full steps are on the /ide page.

The one thing this Mac App Store edition can’t do is the built-in Terminal: Apple’s sandbox blocks the embedded terminal, so you run Claude Code in an external terminal (Terminal.app, iTerm…) instead. The Homebrew / direct-download edition is un-sandboxed: it adds the built-in Terminal (⌃`, opening in your project folder) and skips the one-time Home-folder grant.

It’s the same editor, free, from the same developer. Your App Store copy keeps updating automatically; the Homebrew edition updates with brew upgrade --cask incise.

Get the Homebrew edition

Homebrew

brew tap incise-app/tap
brew trust incise-app/tap
brew install --cask incise

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.

Choose View ▸ Enable Agent Integration (MCP).
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.