ravnpad 1.3.14

Open a file. Write. Save.

That is still the whole product.

Need an agent? Start with --enable-agent. It reads the live buffer and applies a validated edit. 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. Valid edits are applied directly; stale or ambiguous edits are rejected so the agent can reread and merge against the current text.
• Validated direct edits. Every patch is bound to the document revision, buffer hash, and expected text. A valid patch becomes one undoable edit and still does not save; a stale or ambiguous patch is rejected for the agent to reread and merge.
• 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, or more than 128 edits 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.