A native macOS notepad — light, fast, and built to feel like Apple shipped it.
SwiftPad is a plain-text notepad for macOS with one trick most editors don't bother with: pick a theme and the whole window recolors — tab bar, menu bar, status bar, and the page itself — the way Terminal.app themes a window, not just the text you're typing.
- 18 themes, in-window, cross-fading — 12 decoded Terminal.app profiles (Homebrew, Ocean, Man Page, Nord, Dracula, and more) plus classics and system looks.
- Tabs, not extra windows — drag to reorder, closing the last one closes the app.
- A real find bar (⌘F / ⌘H), a live status bar (line/column, character and line counts, click-to-change encoding and line endings), and a native Fonts panel.
- Crash-safe. An unsaved, never-titled tab still survives a force-quit and comes back on next launch.
- Fast: near-zero CPU at rest, a 1.3 MB binary, no bundled frameworks.
- Download the latest
SwiftPad-*.dmgfrom Releases. - Open it and drag SwiftPad into Applications.
- First launch: right-click SwiftPad ▸ Open, then confirm. (macOS Gatekeeper does this once for any app outside the Mac App Store that isn't notarized with a paid Developer ID — SwiftPad is signed, just not notarized. Only needed the first time.)
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Works on Apple Silicon and Intel.
This repository distributes the compiled app only — no source, no issue tracker for feature requests, just the DMG and this page. SwiftPad is a solo, from-scratch project; if that changes, it'll say so here.
The app is provided as-is, free to use. See the in-app About SwiftPad for version and credits.
swiftpad_recording_fast.mov
1.1
