How to use a text editor on Mac
You can do this with Note My, and this is the first ten minutes of it. What each thing on the welcome screen does, how to open and save your first file, and what is already looking after your work before you press Save.
A new editor is mostly a question of confidence. You want to know what the buttons do before you trust the app with something that matters. This guide covers the first ten minutes with Note My — the welcome screen, opening a file, tabs, saving, and the safety net already looking after your work before you press Save.
None of it needs an account, a sign-in or a network connection. Everything happens on your Mac: nothing is uploaded, there is nothing to sign in to, and a file you open never leaves the machine.
What you see the first time
Open the app with no document and you get the empty state — the app's greeting rather than a blank window. It carries the headline Welcome to Note My and the line "Create a new file or open an existing one.", and offers five things:
- New File and Open… — the two buttons, doing exactly what they say.
- See What's Inside and Walk Me Through the Toolbar — two capsules that open the app's two built-in tours.
- Choose what opens at launch — a plain link to the startup setting. It stops being offered once you have made that choice, so it does not nag.
Along the bottom sits the hint line: "Tip: Drag & drop files here • ⌘O to Open • ⌘N for New". Drag a file over the window and that line changes to Drop to open. The window is a drop target, and so is the tab bar once a document is open.
Open your first file
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Open something that already exists
Press ⌘O, press the Open… button, or drag the file from the Finder onto the window. With the Finder extension switched on you can also right-click a file and choose Note My ▸ Open.
If macOS insists a file is not text — no extension, or an extension given to something else — press ⇧⌘O for File ▸ Open Anything as Text…. It will open whatever you point it at, and it will not quietly install itself as the default app for files it should not own — double-clicking that file in the Finder still takes you where it always did.
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Or start a new one
⌘N creates an empty document. Nothing appears in the Finder until you save it — but the work is protected from the first keystroke, as below.
To start from something instead, File ▸ New from Template and the toolbar's Templates pull-down both offer the same catalogue of 40 built-in templates — eight project documents (readme, changelog, contributing and the rest), four licences, ten config files, and eighteen language starters.
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Check the language, or set your own
You do not have to tell the app what kind of file you have opened. Our advanced language identifier gives you the right colours from the moment a document opens, so Swift arrives looking like Swift and JSON like JSON. It all happens on your Mac: nothing is uploaded, and the file never leaves the machine.
A document is never dressed in the wrong language's colours. Some files open as Plain Text instead, and that is your cue to set the language yourself.
The status bar shows the language in use. Click the Identify pill to open the Language Inspector and choose something else if you disagree; your choice sticks for that tab, so the whole file reads the way you want it while you work. Reach for it when a file has no extension, or when you simply want a different set of colours while you read. For a file you return to every week, saving it with the extension that matches its language brings the colours back on their own.
Colour is only ever on screen — it is never written into your file.
The two built-in tours
Both tours live in the Help menu and both are always a deliberate act. Neither one ever opens itself, on first launch or any other time.
Walk Me Through the Toolbar
Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar opens a separate window that draws a replica of the toolbar and steps through it — 21 beats, about two minutes. Each beat names one control, says what it does and when you would reach for it. It advances on its own, but clicking any button in the replica jumps to that button's beat, and any interaction stops the auto-advance for good.
The toolbar it describes is icon-only: 19 items, one glyph per job, and the tour names every one of them in turn. Four of them are switches — Wrap, Show Invisibles, Guides and Smart Edit — and the tour shows them the way you have them set, so you are looking at your own toolbar rather than a stock screenshot.
See What's Inside
Help ▸ Welcome to Note My opens the nine-page app tour: an opening welcome page, then syntax, smart editing, formatting, templates, side-by-side working, power tools, the Finder extension, and a closing page. Page eight is the live one — it shows whether the Finder extension is enabled and offers an Enable… button that hands you to System Settings. Help ▸ Set Up Finder Integration… jumps straight to it. The last page offers the toolbar tour rather than launching it, which is deliberate.
Choosing what opens at launch
Settings ▸ General ▸ Startup (⌘,) has three options, and they govern one moment: what happens when the app opens with nothing to reopen.
| Setting | What happens on an empty launch |
|---|---|
| Welcome screen (default) | Nothing is created. You get the greeting described above. |
| New document | A blank untitled document, every time. |
| Automatic | A document only if the clipboard currently holds text. |
A launch that restores your session, one that brings back work you had not saved, ⌘N, and opening a file are all untouched by this setting.
Automatic opens a document only when there is text waiting on the clipboard. What you copied is not read, shown or kept, and it is not pasted for you — pasting it automatically is a separate switch, off by default.
Working in tabs
Every document gets a tab. What is worth knowing on day one:
- Open more. The
+button, ⌘N, or a double-click on empty tab-bar space. Hold ⌥ while clicking+and it diverts to Open instead of New. - Reorder. Drag a tab sideways to move it. A click that wobbles slightly still selects the tab rather than shuffling the strip.
- Resize. Drag a tab's right edge to make it wider or narrower, and each tab keeps the width you gave it. Worth doing when several filenames look alike.
- Rename. Double-click the title to edit it in place; for a saved file that renames it in the same folder. Rename File… is a different command — a save panel that can move the file anywhere.
- Pin. A pinned tab is held at the front of the strip and stays out of the way of a stray ⌘W — worth doing for the file you keep coming back to all day.
- Right-click (or ⌃-click) a tab for its context menu of around 35 items.
Closing is ⌘W. File ▸ Close All Tabs (⇧⌘W) confirms once for the whole set. The context menu adds Close Other Tabs, Close Tabs to the Right, Close Tabs to the Left and Close Saved Tabs — where "saved" means "has no unsaved edits", so a clean untitled tab counts as saved.
Saving, and what protects you before you do
⌘S saves. ⇧⌘S is Save As, and it pre-fills an extension that matches the document's language, so the file reopens looking the way you left it. ⌥⇧⌘S is Save a Copy As…, which is what you want when you need a second file rather than a new home for this one: Save As makes the tab follow the new file, Save a Copy As… leaves the tab where it is.
Before any of that, our auto-recovery safety net is already looking after the work. What it gives you back:
| If this happens | What you get back |
|---|---|
| The app quits unexpectedly | Your tabs return at the next launch, in order, with the text you never saved still in place. |
| A file changes on disk while you have unsaved edits | You are asked first, every time. Choose Keep My Version and your copy is the one that counts, through a relaunch as well. |
| An untitled document was never saved at all | It still comes back. A document does not have to exist in the Finder to be looked after. |
All of it stays on your Mac, and none of it is uploaded anywhere.
It is on from your first keystroke and asks nothing of you: nothing to switch on, nothing to configure, nothing to remember before you start typing. Its only sign is the leading * on the tab title and in the title bar, telling you this document holds edits you have not saved yet.
The * and the orange dot mean different things. A leading * is unsaved work of yours; an orange dot means the file changed on disk underneath you. One glance along the tab bar tells you which documents are which.
Troubleshooting
The welcome screen never appears
It appears only when there is nothing else to open. If the app restored your last session, or your startup setting is New document, you land in a document instead. Change it in Settings ▸ General ▸ Startup; the tours are in the Help menu either way.
A tab will not close
It is pinned, which is exactly what pinning is for: the tab holds its place and a stray ⌘W bounces off it with a beep. Unpin it from the tab's context menu and it closes like any other.
I chose "Don't Save" by mistake
Look at the bottom of the window. Choosing Don't Save drops a small panel reading "Discarded «Foo.swift» — restore?" with a Restore button. It is offered once and it does not linger, so take it while it is there rather than finishing your sentence first.
Tabs I did not open reappeared after a crash
That is our auto-recovery safety net doing its job. After an unexpected quit, work you had not saved comes back as tabs whose titles begin with *. Nothing to dismiss and nothing to pick through — the work is simply back in front of you, in the order you left it. Save what you want to keep and close the rest.
The file opened with no colour
It opened as Plain Text. Click the Identify pill, pick the language you want, and the document keeps that choice from then on. It is the usual outcome for a file with no extension, and the first thing to try when a stylesheet opens plain. Nothing is broken and nothing is lost: your text is exactly as you left it, and setting the language changes only what you see on screen.
Where the word-wrap setting lives
Soft wrap is one global toggle, kept where you can reach it mid-sentence: in the toolbar and in the View menu, on by default. Turn it off for a long log you would rather scroll sideways, and back on for prose. The indentation options have a home of their own — the sheet the toolbar's Indent button opens, where our indentation engine shows you the change before you accept it.
What to try once the basics feel ordinary
Ten minutes buys you opening, tabs and saving. Here is what is waiting on the other side of that, and where each one lives:
- Change every occurrence at once. The toolbar opens our find and replace as a pop-over over your text, so the document stays in view while you work. Search it, see what matches, and replace one instance or all of them. ⌘F keeps the familiar system find bar for a quick look-up.
- Tidy the indentation. The toolbar's Indent button opens our indentation engine in a sheet: tabs or spaces, the width you want, applied across the file in one pass. Nothing changes until you press Apply, so you can look before you leap.
- Read two documents at once. Multi View gives each pane a tab of its own, which is how you keep a config file beside the code that reads it. Our comparison view is there for the moments you want two versions lined up and the differences called out.
- See what is really in the file. Show Invisibles draws the spaces, tabs and line breaks, and our hidden-character scanner finds the characters that look like nothing and behave like something — the usual culprit behind a line that will not behave.
- Start from something. Our template library hands you 40 documents ready to fill in: a licence, a readme, a changelog, a config file, or a starter in the language you are about to write.
- Do the boring edit once. Our macro recorder records a run of edits and replays them, which turns forty near-identical corrections into one.
- Nothing rewrites your text behind your back. No auto-correct, no smart quotes, no dash substitution, in any mode. Paste always arrives as plain text.
Big files are welcome as well. Our large-file engine keeps a long log or a hefty export scrolling as smoothly as a short note, our encoding handling opens what you point it at and saves it back the way it came, and our cleanup rules take off trailing whitespace and the invisible characters that travel in with pasted text, when you ask them to. All of it happens on your Mac, on your copy of the file.
Where to go next
⌘, opens Settings — 14 panes, with a sidebar search that will find any row by name, so type what you are after rather than hunting for the pane it lives in. ⌘L goes to a line number, ⇧⌘F searches every text file under a folder, and ⌃Space asks for a completion. The toolbar tour stays in the Help menu for as long as you want it.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an account to use it?
You can open the app and start typing straight away. There is no account and no sign-up, and nothing to sign in to. Your files stay on your Mac, nothing is uploaded, and there is no telemetry to opt out of.
Which version of macOS do I need?
macOS 13.0 or later. It is a native, sandboxed Mac app published by MAHTCA GLOBAL and available from the Mac App Store.
Can I run the tours again later?
Yes, as often as you like: Help ▸ Welcome to Note My for the nine-page tour, Help ▸ Walk Me Through the Toolbar for the 21-beat one. Neither ever opens itself.
What happens to work I have not saved if the app quits unexpectedly?
Our auto-recovery safety net brings it back. The next launch reopens the tabs you had, in order, with the text you never saved still there. Tabs holding unsaved work wear a leading *.
Does the app read my clipboard when it launches?
Your clipboard stays yours. The Automatic startup option opens a document when there is text waiting on the clipboard, but what you copied is never read, shown or kept, and it stays on your Mac. Pasting it into that document is a separate setting, off by default.