RavnPad

A simple UTF-8 notepad. Open, edit, and save text. Nothing more.

Install

Prebuilt Windows and macOS binaries are on the GitHub Releases page.

cargo install ravnpad

macOS

Download the ZIP for your Mac: aarch64 for Apple Silicon, or x86_64 for Intel. Extract it and move RavnPad.app to Applications.

Finder and Dock use the RavnPress logo from RavnPad.app/Contents/Resources. The window icon is the same logo, loaded at runtime. Ad hoc signing does not remove the icon.

The app uses a free ad hoc signature. This checks bundle integrity, but does not identify the developer to Apple and is not notarization. No paid Apple account is needed to build these releases. Gatekeeper may still block an app downloaded from the internet.

After trying to open it, use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway if available, and only if you trust the download. See Apple's instructions.

If macOS says the app is damaged, check its signature before making an exception:

codesign --verify --deep --strict --verbose=4 "/Applications/RavnPad.app"

If verification fails, download a fresh copy of the latest release and report the error if it persists. Do not re-sign the downloaded copy to hide the failure.

If verification succeeds, you downloaded it directly from this repository's GitHub Releases, and manual approval is unavailable, you can explicitly remove the download quarantine for this app only:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/RavnPad.app"

This bypasses the download quarantine check for RavnPad; it does not notarize it or prove the download is trustworthy. Do not disable Gatekeeper system-wide.

Release builds verify the app signature both before packaging and after extracting the ZIP. This does not replace testing the downloaded app on a Mac with Gatekeeper enabled.

Requirements

• Rust 1.88 or newer
• On Linux: common GUI libraries (libxcb, libxkbcommon, GTK 3 for native dialogs)

Run

cargo run --release

Build a Windows exe

On a Windows machine with Rust installed:

cargo build --release

The binary is target\release\ravnpad.exe. Release builds hide the console window. The app icon is the RavnPress logo.

On Windows, RavnPad registers itself for text files (.txt, .text, .log, .md) at startup, without administrator rights. Double-clicking those files opens them in RavnPad. If Windows already has another default app, choose RavnPad under Open with.

Usage

Open, Save as, unsaved-changes, and error alerts use the operating system’s own dialogs. Settings stays in-app (egui cannot draw a native Preferences window).

Settings has language, editor font, and font size. RavnPad starts in the system language when it is one of the built-in ones (Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk, English, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, and Czech). Settings are remembered.

On Windows and macOS, RavnPad checks GitHub Releases for a newer version at startup. Use Help → Check for updates to check now; if an update is found, RavnPad downloads it and restarts. Linux builds from cargo install are not auto-updated.

Unsaved changes prompt before New, Open, Quit, and drag-and-drop. Only UTF-8 is supported. Opening an .rtf file converts it to plain text and saves a .txt file next to it. Files larger than 2 MB open as a read-only view (scroll through the file without loading it all into memory), so large logs do not freeze the app.

Open a file from the command line with ravnpad file.txt (or drop the file on the program icon). Drag-and-drop into the window works on Windows and on Linux via X11.

The Ravn logo is a registered trademark.