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 1.12.19macOS 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 — no fonts, no styling, no RTF, nothing 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, no autocapitalisation, no 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.