ravnpad 1.3.10

Word is for documents. The web is for everything else. RavnPad is for the file in front of you: a log, a note, a dump, a .txt you just want to read and change.

It starts instantly, stays out of the way, and does not try to become an IDE.

Why people keep it

• Native editing — AppKit/NSTextView on macOS and Win32/Rich Edit on Windows, with system menus, selection, undo, scrolling, font selection, and Open/Save dialogs.
• Fifteen languages — Bokmål, Nynorsk, English, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, and Czech. Follows the system language when it can.
• Your font — pick a system typeface and size. Settings are remembered.
• Light or dark — follow the operating-system theme automatically, or choose a theme yourself.
• Pick up where you left off — recent files are one click away and reopen at the remembered reading position.
• Your layout — toggle wrapping for long lines; the choice also applies to huge-file viewing.
• RTF in, text out — open .rtf as an unsaved UTF-8 document, with a sibling .txt suggested when saving.
• Huge files — over 2 MB opens as a read-only windowed view. Scroll a 2 GB log without freezing.
• Updates itself — on Windows and macOS, Help → Check for updates (release builds also check at startup).
• Open with — on Windows, register for .txt and friends without admin rights. RavnPad does not steal Word as the default handler.

Get it

Download Windows and macOS builds from ravnpad.com, or grab a binary from GitHub Releases.

• Windows: unzip and run ravnpad.exe
• Apple Silicon: ravnpad-macos-aarch64.zip
• Intel Mac: ravnpad-macos-x86_64.zip

Or install from source:

cargo install ravnpad

Then run ravnpad, or ravnpad notes.txt. Drag a file onto the window (Windows, and Linux on X11).

macOS first launch

The app is ad hoc signed, not Apple-notarized. Gatekeeper may block the first open. If you trust the download from this repository, use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. See Apple’s instructions.

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

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

If verification fails, download a fresh copy and report it. Do not re-sign the file to hide a failed check.

If verification succeeds, you downloaded it from GitHub Releases, and Open Anyway is unavailable, you can clear the quarantine for this app only:

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

That does not notarize RavnPad. Do not turn Gatekeeper off.

Shortcuts

Unsaved changes ask before New, Open, Quit, and drop. Only UTF-8 is supported.

macOS: use ⌘ instead of Ctrl. Settings are in the application menu (⌘,); Find is ⌘F. The native font panel and spelling services are available. The app follows the system appearance.

Windows: Settings contains language, font and spelling options. Ctrl+F opens the native Find dialog; Ctrl+H opens Replace. Native text services provide input-method and proofing support where installed.

Native macOS and Windows builds edit files up to 16 MiB. Linux retains the measured 2 MiB edit limit for the egui interface. Larger files are read-only; the file-position slider loads a bounded window in the background, while native Find scans the complete file.

Theme, recent-file, reading-position and line-wrapping preferences are remembered. File dialogs and alerts use the operating system.

Build

Rust 1.88+, plus Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS or the MSVC C compiler/Windows SDK on Windows. On Linux you also want libxcb, libxkbcommon, and GTK 3 (native dialogs).

cargo run --release

Windows:

cargo build --release

The exe is target\release\ravnpad.exe. Release builds hide the console.

Agent access (opt-in)

Start RavnPad with --enable-agent to expose the current live document to local clients for this process only. The endpoint uses an owner-only named pipe on Windows (remote clients are rejected) or a private Unix socket. Closing RavnPad, opening another document, or restarting invalidates the document reference.

ravnpad --enable-agent notes.txt

ravnpad-cli document status --instance INSTANCE_ID --json

ravnpad-cli document read --instance INSTANCE_ID --document DOCUMENT_ID --json

ravnpad-cli document propose --instance INSTANCE_ID --document DOCUMENT_ID --stdin --json < patch.json

The Windows release archive places ravnpad-cli.exe and ravnpad-mcp.exe beside ravnpad.exe. The macOS release bundle places both command-line tools in RavnPad.app/Contents/Helpers/.

Instance IDs are the names of the small endpoint files in RavnPad's agent configuration directory. document status resolves the current document ID. Direct file access is deliberately separate and read-only:

ravnpad-cli file read notes.txt --json

Patches use half-open UTF-8 byte ranges and must include operation_id, document_id, base_revision, base_hash, and an edits array. Every edit contains start_byte, end_byte, expected_text, and replacement. RavnPad validates the complete patch before showing a side-by-side proposal. Rejection changes nothing; approval updates the buffer as one undoable action and does not save the target file. Stale revisions, invalid UTF-8 boundaries, overlapping edits, ambiguous insertions, and mixed line endings are rejected. Patches are limited to 128 edits and 256 KiB of changed before/after text so every changed hunk can be shown in full in the approval preview.

Read responses are shortened at a UTF-8 boundary when JSON escaping would make the encoded response exceed the one-MiB transport limit; content_complete is then false. Proposal results cannot contain NUL or unsupported line endings and must stay within the platform's editable-file limit (16 MiB on Windows/macOS, 2 MiB elsewhere). Pending proposal bodies share twice that platform limit as a memory budget. Completed proposals retain only bounded receipt metadata, while up to 1,024 operation IDs remain available for idempotent retries during the document session. Once that history is full, new operation IDs are rejected until another document is opened.

ravnpad-mcp exposes the same status, read, and propose operations as MCP tools over stdio. It writes only newline-delimited JSON-RPC messages to stdout; logs and diagnostics go to stderr.

License and mark

MIT. The Ravn logo is a registered trademark.

Native control smoke tests

cargo test --locked

cargo build --release --locked

./target/release/ravnpad --native-smoke-test

The smoke test instantiates the actual platform text control and verifies Unicode round trips, undo/redo, document replacement and read-only loading. It does not open a user document or load preferences. CI runs it on Windows and both Mac architectures before producing packages.