JATEFree and open source
Just another text editorthat gets out of your way
Tabs, focus mode, and margins you set yourself. Everything stays on your Mac — no account, no cloud, no telemetry.
Sep 7 — sharper welcome screen, faster scrolling in very large files
The room had the particular stillness of a place where someone had recently stopped arguing. Two cups, both cold. A window that had been open long enough for the papers to move.
She wrote the sentence, looked at it, and wrote it again without the word particular. It was better. Most sentences are better with one word gone.
Why JATE
There are a dozen minimal editors for the Mac. Almost all of them give you one window and one file.
JATE gives you tabs, a focus mode, and typography you control down to the margin — and then stays completely quiet. No sign-in screen, no sync spinner, no assistant. It opens a text file and it saves a text file.
Tabs
A dozen files, one window
Control-Tab moves forward, Command-Shift-Arrow moves sideways. Drag a tab out and it becomes a window; drag it back and it doesn't. Nothing to learn — it is the macOS tab behaviour, done properly.
⌃ Tab⌘ ⇧ ←⌘ ⇧ →
Outline
Everything behind the window dims. The sentence you are writing is the only thing with any light on it.
Focus mode
Dim the rest of the screen
One shortcut drops everything except the document you are in. The same shortcut brings it back, with the same soft fade going out as coming in.
⌘ ⇧ C
Typography
Your margins, not a designer's
Drag the padding until the page feels right. Set line length, line spacing and font, and watch the text move while you drag it. The caret is a proper cap-height bar, because that detail bothered someone enough to fix it.
⌘ ⇧ P
// no build step, no language server const greet = (name) => { return `Hello, ${name}!`; }; listen(8080, greet);
Developer mode
Open a config file without opening an IDE
One shortcut turns on syntax colouring for Swift, JavaScript, Python, JSON, YAML, HTML, CSS, Markdown, shell and C-like files. It stays a text editor: no autocomplete, no linting, no project tree, nothing that wants to help.
⌘ ⇧ D
What it doesn't do
The list is deliberate, and it is here rather than buried in a FAQ. If one of these is what you came for, another app will serve you better — and that's a fine outcome for both of us.
- Rich text
- Markdown preview
- Cloud sync
- Accounts
- Plugins
- AI anything
- Sidebars
- A project tree
Privacy
It can't phone home. There is no phone.
JATE ships with no networking code at all — no analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. That isn't a promise in a policy document; the source is public and you can check it in an afternoon.
Questions people actually ask
How is this different from TextEdit?
TextEdit is a word processor that can be talked into plain text. JATE only ever does plain text, and it has tabs, a focus mode and adjustable margins, which TextEdit does not.
Will it stay free?
Yes. No paid tier, no trial, no subscription, no in-app purchases. If it ever needs money to survive, that will be said out loud here first.
Is there iCloud sync?
No, and there won't be. Keep your files in iCloud Drive or Dropbox and JATE will open them like any other file — the syncing is your Mac's job, not the editor's.
Why is there no Markdown preview?
Because a preview pane is the first step toward a word processor. Developer mode will colour your Markdown, but it will never render it.
Does it handle big files?
A few megabytes of log or CSV opens and scrolls fine. Past that, syntax colouring switches itself off and the status bar tells you why.
What about encodings?
Files are read as UTF-8, UTF-16 or Latin-1, whichever fits, and always written back as UTF-8. Windows line endings survive a round trip untouched.
1.3 megabytes. Nothing to sign up for.
Download it, open a file, and see whether it disappears the way a good tool should.