Accessible text editor for Mac

Note My is built to be driven by ear and by keyboard as readily as by eye, and it takes its cues from the settings you have already chosen in System Settings. This page walks you through what you will meet on your first launch: the names VoiceOver speaks, the movement Reduce Motion brings to a stop, and the marks Increase Contrast brings back into view. If you use any of the three, this page tells you what to expect from Note My before you install it. Everything described below happens on your Mac: nothing is uploaded, there is no account to make, and your files never leave the machine.

How to read the toolbar out loud

The toolbar is drawn as icons, which keeps the window calm and the glyphs large. For anyone using a screen reader that turns out to be good news: what VoiceOver announces is the item's full name, spoken in full rather than as a shorter, vaguer stand-in. Learn the nineteen names once and you can drive the whole bar by ear.

Two further behaviours are worth knowing before you meet the bar:

• A toolbar item that opens a menu announces itself as a pop-up button, rather than as a plain button, so you know a list is coming before you commit to it. Activating it from VoiceOver does exactly what clicking it does.
• Four items are toggles that read live state: Wrap, Show Invisibles, Guides and Smart Edit. A latched toggle is drawn as a solid accent disc with a white glyph, and its tooltip text spells the state out in words — for example "Indentation guides: OFF — click to show" and "Smart Editing: OFF — plain newlines and typing".

Visually, the bar is divided into eleven glass capsules. A run of plain buttons shares a capsule, and every item that opens a menu takes a capsule of its own — though a plain button can end up alone in one too, so the dependable tell for a menu is the chevron drawn beside the glyph rather than the capsule around it. That grouping is what your eye uses to find a region of the bar quickly, and it does not reshuffle as you work.

The nineteen toolbar names, in order

This is the whole bar, left to right, with the name each item announces and how it reports itself.

One name is worth a sentence of its own. Multi View gives every open tab its own pane, so the files you are working on sit side by side rather than one behind another, and Single View collapses back to the tab you have selected. Every pane holds a different tab, which is what makes the pair useful for reading one file against another. The two sit next to each other in the bar and make a simple rhythm: spread out to compare, collapse to concentrate.

Four of those names are worth a line each. Templates opens our template library, so a new file can start as something you have already shaped. Compare opens our comparison view, which sets two files side by side and marks what differs. Macros holds our macro recorder, for the edit you are about to make forty times. Clean gathers our cleanup rules, so you apply a tidy-up by name instead of by hand.

The status bar has its own spoken form

Along the bottom sit six counter pills — Chars, Words, Spaces, Lines, Sel and Occ. Stopping on each of them in turn would be tedious, so the footer is one stop rather than six. VoiceOver reads it as a single run-on line — "Chars: — • Words: — • …" — and you get every count in one utterance.

That makes the footer worth a visit whenever you want a quick sense of where you are: how far the document has grown, how much of it you currently have selected, and how often the word you have selected turns up elsewhere in the file. It is the fastest way to check the size of a change by ear, before and after an edit, without moving the insertion point.

Reduce Motion: what stops moving

Reduce Motion is honoured in the places you would notice it most, and the movement genuinely stops rather than simply running faster. Set it once in System Settings and the editor follows immediately, with no preference of ours to find first. Specifically:

• Indentation guides. Enabling, disabling and changing style normally cross-fade. With Reduce Motion on, all of those fades are skipped.
• The hidden-character markers. When our hidden-character scanner turns up a stray non-breaking space or a zero-width character, the marker normally pulses and then settles at a lower emphasis so it stays findable. With Reduce Motion on the pulse is skipped entirely and the settled emphasis appears straight away — you keep the finding without the movement.
• The Settings window. The cross-fade between panes is skipped. When you use the sidebar search and jump to a row, the row's highlight is held longer instead of animating, so you can still see which row was found without anything moving.

The pattern behind all three is worth noticing, because it is what makes the setting trustworthy here: wherever movement was carrying information — which guide style you chose, where the stray character sits, which settings row your search found — the information stays and only the movement goes. You are never asked to trade the finding for the calm.

Both guided tours become a single still frame

The app ships two optional tours. Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar is twenty-one beats and about two minutes, and Help ▸ Welcome to Note My is a nine-page carousel whose first page is a looping film of a pencil writing.

With Reduce Motion on, both come to rest. That is worth being precise about, because "reduced motion" often means a paused animation that still lurches into place. Here, each tour shows a single still frame. Not a paused animation — no animation. The welcome screen shows the picture at rest, so what you see is the finished document with all three braces and the pencil sitting on the page, and you move through the nine pages at whatever pace suits you.

The toolbar tour also carries a spoken description of the motion for each of its twenty-one beats, so a VoiceOver user receives everything the animation was carrying, beat by beat, and comes out the far side knowing the bar by name.

Increase Contrast and the indentation guides

Indentation guides are faint vertical marks by design, and faint marks are the first thing to disappear for a low-vision reader. Turn on Increase Contrast in System Settings and the guides come back substantially darker — enough to follow a nesting level down a long file, without becoming solid bars that compete with the code.

You can go further than that, because the style itself is yours to choose. Settings ▸ Guides offers ten styles, in this order: Dots (the default), Color Dots, Dashed, Thin, Medium, Thick, Rail, Beam, Accent and Spectrum. Thick, Rail and Beam are the heavy end. Guides are on by default, and the pane carries a preview tile for each style, so you can compare the whole set and settle on one in a few seconds.

Two neighbouring panes help for the same reason. Settings ▸ Ruler offers four gutter styles — Classic (the default), Recessed, Edge and Cadence — changing how strongly the line-number column separates from the text. Settings ▸ Invisibles offers three marker styles: Symbols (the default), Code Points and Bytes.

Light, dark and what comes out of the printer

Light and dark are both fully supported, through the window and into the colouring our syntax engine gives your code. Switch appearance in System Settings and the window follows immediately, with no need to quit and reopen. Printing gets a deliberate decision of its own: File ▸ Print… (⌘P) uses a print-friendly light theme by default whichever appearance the app is in, so a dark interface still hands you a clean page rather than a page of black ink.

Getting around without a mouse

Most of the daily work has a real keyboard shortcut behind it. These are the ones to learn first:

The Settings window deserves its own mention. Press ⌘, and the sidebar carries a search field that reaches every row across all fourteen panes, so you can get to a setting by name — guides, invisibles, ruler — without knowing which pane holds it.

Gestures that beat a trip to the menu

A few jobs in the editor are a single gesture, and they are worth learning early because a gesture lands faster than any menu.

• Fold a block. Double-click a brace and everything between it and its partner collapses to a single line, so a long function gets out of the way while you read what surrounds it.
• Light up every occurrence. Double-click an identifier and each other appearance of it is marked across the document — the quickest way to see where a name is used before you change it.
• Rename a tab. Double-click the tab and type the name you would rather see there.
• Bookmark a line. Right-click in the gutter beside it. If your hands are already on the keys, ⌘F2 does the same job, and F2 and ⇧F2 walk you forwards and backwards through the marks you have set.

Indenting a whole document in one pass

Indent opens a sheet and changes nothing on its own; the document only moves when you press Apply. Our indentation engine then works across the file from top to bottom in one pass, which is exactly what you want for something that arrived with tabs in some places and spaces in others — one instruction and one consistent result, rather than a hundred small corrections made by hand.

It pairs neatly with two neighbours in the bar. Show Invisibles puts the whitespace on screen first, so you can see what you are dealing with, and Guides draws the nesting levels afterwards so you can check the result by eye. If you would rather have the version you started with, File ▸ Reload from Disk (⌘R) brings the saved copy back into the window — and reloading never changes the file on disk.

Moving through a file you did not write

Reading someone else's work is mostly navigation, and nearly all of it sits on the keyboard. ⇧⌘O opens anything as text, so a file with an unfamiliar extension still lands in front of you. ⌘L takes a line number and goes there. ⇧⌘F widens the search to a whole folder when what you are after is somewhere else in the project. ⌥⌘E and ⌥⇧⌘E step forwards and backwards through errors, so you can work through a file problem by problem instead of line by line.

Two more toolbar items earn their place on a long file. Compare opens our comparison view when you want to see what changed between two versions rather than hunt for it, and Templates saves you the opening paragraph next time by letting a new file start from a shape you have already settled on. Between those, the shortcuts above and the footer counters, you can arrive at an unfamiliar file, take its measure and be working within a minute.

Troubleshooting

VoiceOver reads a toolbar button as something unexpected

Check it against the table above. The announced names are literal rather than descriptive — "Indent" opens a sheet rather than indenting anything on the spot, and "Single View" collapses panes rather than doing anything to a single file. Neither changes your text until you confirm.

How do I check whether a toggle is on?

The four toggles carry their state in two places: visually as a solid accent disc with a white glyph when latched, and in words in the tooltip text, which changes with the state — "Word wrap: off — click to wrap long lines to the window" becomes the on form once wrap is active. If you would rather not go via the tooltip, each toggle has a second home that reports the same state: Wrap lives in the View menu; Show Invisibles in the View menu and in Settings ▸ Invisibles; Guides in Settings ▸ Guides; Smart Edit in the Edit menu and in Settings ▸ Editing.

I want a guided tour but not the movement

Turn on Reduce Motion in System Settings before you open either tour from the Help menu. Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar then gives you twenty-one still beats with a spoken description attached to each, and Help ▸ Welcome to Note My shows its picture at rest. You can take both at your own pace, and neither one starts itself, so the app stays quiet until you ask for it.

I know the setting by name but not which pane it lives in

Press ⌘, and type the name into the sidebar search field. It reaches every row across all fourteen panes, so guides, invisibles or ruler will take you straight there. With Reduce Motion on, the row it finds is held highlighted for longer rather than animated, so it is easy to spot when you arrive.

The indentation guides are still too faint

Turn on Increase Contrast first — it is the cheapest change, and it darkens the guides everywhere at once without you having to pick a style. If they are still hard to see, switch style in Settings ▸ Guides to Thick, Rail or Beam. The preview tiles in that pane show exactly what will appear in the editor, so you can compare all ten before you commit.

I opened a find bar and it looks plainer than I expected

You have reached the macOS one, which ⌘F and ⌥⌘F bring up in any Mac app. Our find and replace is the richer tool: it lives in a pop-over on the Find & Replace toolbar item, and it adds a scope switch between this file and all open tabs, case-sensitive and whole-word options, a regular-expression option, and a live match count that keeps up as you sharpen the query. Keep the toolbar on screen with ⌥⌘T and it stays one click away from wherever the insertion point is.

Frequently asked questions

Does VoiceOver work with an icon-only toolbar?

Yes. Every item announces its full name rather than a shortened stand-in, items that open a menu announce themselves as pop-up buttons, and activating one from VoiceOver does the same thing as clicking it. The nineteen names, in bar order, are listed above.

Which system accessibility settings does the app follow?

Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast both change the editor as soon as you set them, with no preference of ours to find first. Reduce Motion stills the guide cross-fades, the hidden-character marker, the Settings pane transitions and both guided tours. Increase Contrast darkens the indentation guides so a nesting level stays followable down a long file. Light and dark appearance is followed too, live, while the app is running.

Do the guided tours animate if I have Reduce Motion turned on?

Each tour shows a single still frame, so there is nothing to pause and nothing that lurches into place. You still get everything the tour was telling you, in words and in a picture that holds still — the toolbar tour carries a spoken description for each of its twenty-one beats. Both are reached deliberately from the Help menu or the welcome screen, so they stay out of your way until you want them.

Is there a dark mode?

Yes, light and dark throughout, and the window follows an appearance change while the app is running rather than waiting for a restart. Printing is looked after separately by design: it uses a light, print-friendly theme by default whichever appearance the app is in, so what comes out of the printer stays readable and easy on the ink.

How much of the daily work is on the keyboard?

Most of it. Opening, saving, closing tabs, going to a line, searching a whole folder, bookmarking and stepping between bookmarks, jumping between errors, auto-complete and call tips, revealing in Finder, copying a path, Settings, the toolbar and full screen all have shortcuts, and they are listed in the table above. Folding a block, lighting up every occurrence of a name and renaming a tab are quick double-click gestures, and Find & Replace opens from its toolbar item.

Does the app change my text on its own?

Your text stays exactly as you typed it. Nothing is rewritten for you, in any mode: no auto-correct, no smart quotes, no dash substitution, no link or data detection. Plain Text mode turns on the macOS spelling and grammar underlines, which mark text without altering it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere either — the work happens on your Mac, there is no account, and your files never leave the machine.

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