InciseNotepad · plain textThe Mac equivalent of Notepad
macOS ships no Notepad. The usual answer is TextEdit, and it works until it doesn’t: it opens in rich text by default, so it quietly saves an .rtf, curls your quotes, and capitalises what you typed. You end up in Format ▸ Make Plain Text every single time, and paste something into a terminal that no longer works.
Incise is a free, native Mac editor that is only ever plain text. It opens instantly to a blank tab, never formats anything behind your back, and keeps your unsaved scratch notes across a quit: the parts of Notepad worth keeping, without the parts that make you miss it.
Version 1.12.33macOS 13.0+Notarized & Signed
What Notepad got right, kept
Always plain text
There is no rich-text mode to fall out of. What you type is what lands in the file, with no fonts or styling and no RTF to convert back.
Opens instantly
Launches in well under a second and opens a blank tab ready to type in, the way Notepad does. It stays fast on files far larger than Notepad will open.
Nothing autocorrects
No smart quotes, autocapitalisation, or substitutions. A straight quote stays a straight quote, which matters the moment you paste a note into a terminal or a config file.
Never loses a scratch note
Every tab is cached to disk as you type and restored when you reopen the app, including ones you never saved and never named.
Tabs instead of windows
Keep a dozen notes in one window and switch with ⌘1…⌘9, rather than a separate window per file.
Word wrap, already on
Long lines wrap to the window by default, so a pasted paragraph doesn't scroll off the right edge.
Coming from Windows
The muscle memory mostly transfers. The handful of things that don’t:
And when a note becomes work
The same window scales up when the note turns into something else: syntax highlighting for two dozen languages, regex find & replace across a whole folder, multiple cursors, side-by-side diff, code folding, and a file tree, none of it in your way until you reach for it.
If Notepad was never quite enough on Windows either, the page you probably want is Incise as a native Notepad++ for Mac. For spreadsheets-that-aren’t, there’s the CSV & data editor, or the full feature set.