A markdown editor. Free, open source, file-first, and unreasonably well-typeset.
That's the editor, mid-edit, in the Plate theme. The ## and ** haven't
vanished — they've receded: still legible, still telling you what the
structure is, ready to breathe back up when your cursor arrives. The table
is a real grid you edit in place; the file underneath it is tidy pipes,
aligned in the file itself, not just on screen.
Foolscap is a single beautiful writing surface for markdown files. The buffer is plain markdown text at all times — live preview is decorations over that text, never a document model — so the file on disk is always exactly what you wrote. What you see in the editor is what HTML and PDF export produce, because one pipeline drives all three:
- Files open where you left them; ⇧⌘T reopens a closed tab; drop an image from Finder or paste a URL over a selection and the markdown writes itself
- Live preview of every markdown construct: headings (Fraunces, real optical sizing), emphasis, lists with hanging indents and real bullets, links (Cmd-click to open), Shiki-highlighted code fences, inline images, blockquotes, rules, clickable task-list checkboxes, and tables that render as a real grid and edit in place (click a cell and type; ⌥-click for the pipe source with its normalizing formatter, drag-to-resize columns, and hover column controls)
- Atomic saves — temp file, fsync, rename; a crash can never truncate your manuscript
- Autosave with a browsable version history (File ▸ Browse Versions…), restores that ⌘Z undoes, and an undo stack that survives relaunch
- External-change watching: clean buffers reload silently, dirty buffers get a choice
- Command palette (⌘K) with recent files a keystroke away, find & replace, outline panel, typewriter and focus modes, optional line numbers, a word count that counts the selection
- Seven themes — from the house Ledger and Plate to GitHub, Vercel, and VS Code — plus load-your-own-CSS custom themes (THEMING.md)
- Ten writing faces, five serif and five sans; one font per page, and code keeps Ioskeley Mono
- Paste images from the clipboard, or drop them from Finder, into a sibling
assets/folder - Tabs and windows — drag a tab out and it becomes a window — with full session restore:
⌘Qquits silently and the next launch sets the desk back up, unsaved drafts included - Self-contained HTML export and typeset PDF export with the editor's real fonts — pretty-wrapped, hyphenated, headings balanced
- Signed, notarized, and self-updating; checks for updates from the Help menu or Settings
Deliberately, and permanently for v1 — please don't file issues asking for:
- Vaults, workspaces, or folder-as-database concepts. Files are files.
- Sync, cloud, accounts, telemetry.
- Graph view, backlinks, wiki-links, tags.
- A plugin API. (Themes are not plugins; themes are in.)
- Collaborative editing.
- Mobile.
- AI features. There are forty of those. This one is about writing.
- Diagram rendering (Mermaid et al.). Fences show their source, beautifully — decided and closed.
Foolscap is a macOS app. The Windows and Linux packaging config exists and may even work, but nobody here runs it — it is untested and unsupported for now.
Grab the DMG from Releases —
arm64 for Apple Silicon, plain for Intel. Since 0.6.1, builds are
signed and notarized: drag to Applications and open like anything else.
Since 0.7.0, updates take care of themselves: Foolscap downloads new
versions quietly, mentions it once in a toast when one is ready, and
installs on restart — or on whatever quit comes naturally.
(Releases before 0.6.1 were unsigned — if macOS grumbles about an old download, just grab a current one.)
Two editions, one version. The DMG above is the direct edition: it
updates itself. The Mac App Store edition is the same version number and
the same code, minus every trace of self-updating — the Store delivers its
updates, and App Review requires that apps not add checks of their own.
The Store edition is marked -mas wherever Apple lets us mark it: About
Foolscap reads "0.16.0-mas (App Store)" there and "0.16.0 (Direct download)"
here, the package is Foolscap-0.16.0-mas-universal.pkg, and each Store
submission is tagged v0.16.0-mas.1 (the bundle's own version string must
stay plain digits, Apple's rule, so it is the same 0.16.0 in both).
pnpm install
pnpm dev # run in development
pnpm test # vitest
pnpm typecheck
pnpm pack:app # unsigned local app build (dist/)
pnpm dist # full installers