SwiftPad
macOS 14+  ·  Apple Silicon & Intel
A native macOS notepad, built from scratch

It colors the whole window.
Not just the page.

Pick a look below and watch every band repaint at once — title bar, tabs, status bar, the page itself — the way Terminal.app themes a window. Eighteen of them ship in the app.

Dear future me — this is SwiftPad.
No Xcode project. No dependencies.
1.3 MB, idle CPU near zero.
Native, the whole way down.
Ln 4, Col 29   114 characters   4 lines Default100%UTF-8LF
Download for macOS
DMG · ad-hoc signed — first launch needs right-click ▸ Open.
~0%
Idle CPU
1.3 MB
Compiled binary
0
Third-party deps
~3,050
Lines of Swift

What it actually does

4 of many

TextKit 2, not a toy text view

The editor runs on NSTextContentStorage + NSTextLayoutManager — Apple's current, viewport-based text engine — migrated deliberately from the layout-manager wiring most hand-built NSTextViews still default to.

Real menu bar, real toolbar

File, Edit, and View are the actual system menu bar — not an in-window lookalike. New, Open, Save, Find, and Share sit in a genuine NSToolbar sharing the title bar with the traffic lights, so every click, shortcut, and VoiceOver label comes straight from AppKit.

Crash-safe by default

An untitled tab you never saved still survives a force-quit — its content is quietly backed up to disk as you type, and handed right back, still marked unsaved, the next time you open the app.

No Xcode project

Built and ad-hoc signed entirely from the command line with Swift Package Manager — no .xcodeproj anywhere in the tree, no bundled frameworks in the app either.

Eighteen looks, named

12 Terminal.app profiles · 4 classics · 2 system