ravnpad 1.3.12

Open a file. Write. Save.

That is still the whole product.

Need an agent? Start with --enable-agent. It reads the live buffer and proposes an edit. You approve. It does not save.

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

Uncomplicated on purpose

• Open, write, save — native AppKit on macOS, Win32 Rich Edit on Windows. System menus, undo, fonts, Find, Open/Save. No project, no sidebar, no cloud account.
• Fifteen languages — follows the system language when it can. Bokmål, Nynorsk, English, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, and Czech.
• Your font and theme — pick a system typeface and size. Light, dark, or follow the OS. Choices are remembered, including recents, reading position, and wrap.
• Huge files — over 2 MB opens as a read-only windowed view. Scroll a 2 GB log without freezing.
• RTF in, text out — open .rtf as an unsaved UTF-8 document. A sibling .txt is suggested when you save.
• Updates itself — Help → Check for updates. Release builds also check at startup on Windows and macOS.
• Open with — on Windows, register for .txt and friends without admin rights. RavnPad does not steal Word.

Agents that ask first

Most AI editors become a chat with a text area attached. RavnPad does the opposite: the notepad stays a notepad. Turn on agent access for the current process from Agent → Enable agent mode, or start RavnPad with --enable-agent.

• Live buffer, not the disk. The agent reads what you are looking at, including unsaved edits. It never falls back to the file on disk.
• Propose. You approve. A revision- and hash-bound patch. Side-by-side preview. Rejection changes nothing. Approval is one undoable edit and still does not save.
• Local, owner-only. Windows uses an owner-only named pipe (remote clients are rejected). macOS and Linux use a private Unix socket. No cloud sidecar, no always-on daemon.

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

Direct file access is separate and read-only:

ravnpad-cli file read notes.txt --json

MCP for Claude, Cursor, Codex, and friends:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ravnpad": {
      "command": "ravnpad-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Windows zip: ravnpad-cli.exe and ravnpad-mcp.exe sit beside ravnpad.exe. macOS: both tools live in RavnPad.app/Contents/Helpers/. Instance IDs are the JSON filenames in RavnPad’s agent config directory.

Paste-ready agent rules: ravnpad.com.

A patch must include operation_id, document_id, base_revision, base_hash, and edits[] with start_byte, end_byte, expected_text, and replacement (half-open UTF-8 byte ranges). Overlaps, invalid UTF-8 boundaries, mixed line endings, NUL, more than 128 edits, or more than 256 KiB of changed text are rejected. Closing RavnPad, opening another document, or restarting drops the handle.

Get it

Download from ravnpad.com or GitHub Releases.

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

macOS builds are Developer ID signed, Apple-notarized, and stapled. Drop RavnPad.app into Applications and open it.

Or install from source:

cargo install ravnpad

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

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. Native font panel and spelling. Follows the system appearance.

Windows: Settings has language, font, and spelling. Ctrl+F is Find; Ctrl+H is Replace.

Native macOS and Windows builds edit files up to 16 MiB. Linux keeps the measured 2 MiB edit limit for the egui interface. Larger files are read-only.

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.

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.

License and mark

MIT. The Ravn logo is a registered trademark.