KlarText is a minimalist text editor designed around the principle that plain text is the only format with genuine longevity. A .txt file written fifty years ago opens today, without conversion, without a subscription, without the original software. KlarText on the App Store
Core Philosophy
The application adheres to one fundamental principle: features must be essential to writing and editing, or they don't exist in KlarText. This means no syntax highlighting, plugins, AI features, or other distractions — just a focused writing environment.
Key Capabilities
The editor includes several standout tools:
- Paste and Reflow intelligently handles text from various sources, rejoining hard-wrapped lines while preserving lists and code blocks
- Paste from PDF repairs text copied out of a PDF — words split across line breaks are rejoined, page numbers and running heads dropped, ligatures and soft hyphens turned back into plain letters — while section titles and lists stay where they belong
- Join List as Prose converts bullet points into flowing paragraphs with proper capitalization and punctuation
- Focus Mode strips away interface elements for distraction-free writing
- New from Clipboard opens whatever you last copied as a fresh document, with no save dialog in the way
- Typewriter Scrolling keeps the cursor vertically centred for a calm, focused writing experience
Editing Tools
- Move and Duplicate Lines — rearrange or duplicate lines with keyboard shortcuts
- Sort Lines and Remove Duplicates — text transforms for cleaning up lists, configs, and data
- Wrap at Column — hard-wrap text at 72, 80, 100, 120, or a custom column width
- Convert Indentation — switch a document between tabs and spaces, at your chosen tab width
- XML Tools — reindent, one element per line, minify, check well-formedness, and escape or unescape entities; multi-megabyte GPX tracks reformat without freezing the window
- Clean Up PDF Text — run the same PDF repair over text that is already in the document, with every pass individually switchable in Settings
- Insert File — drop the contents of another file in at the cursor
- Go to Line — jump straight to a line number
- Strip Trailing Whitespace — clean up invisible trailing spaces on demand or automatically on save
- Highlight Current Line — a subtle tint marks the line you're editing
- Highlight All Occurrences — select a word and every other occurrence in the document lights up
- Find in Open Documents — search across all open files at once, with results grouped by document
- Session Restore — optionally reopen all documents from the previous session on launch
Additional Features
KlarText also offers multi-document management with a sidebar, regex find & replace, line numbers, word count, show invisibles, auto-indent, spelling and grammar checking, and printing with Save as PDF. Text is set in your choice of proportional or monospace font, with adjustable line height and paragraph spacing, in a light or dark theme. Encoding is detected automatically — including a file's own declaration, whether an XML declaration or an HTML meta charset — and any document can be reopened with a different one; when a declaration and the bytes disagree, the status bar says so rather than quietly producing mojibake, and the file is never rewritten behind your back. If a file changes on disk underneath you, KlarText notices. Plain text of every stripe opens here, .gpx tracks and .nmea logs included. It's built as a native macOS application with zero dependencies.