The whole editor, on one page

Opening

• A 4.23 GB log opens in 2 ms50.4 million lines, on a few megabytes of memory — measured on an M-series Mac, not estimated.
• The threshold is yoursSettings decides the size past which a file is mapped rather than read; 64 MB by default.
• The status bar says which it didMapped or in memory, with the size on disk and the line count beside it.
• Progress never blocks the textLong work appears as a strip above the status bar with a Stop button — never a modal sheet — and the text stays readable and scrollable while it runs.
• Small files skip all of itUnder 4 MB a file opens straight away, and the strip only appears at all if work is still running after a quarter of a second.
• A line of any length is drawnA minified bundle or a JSON document on one line is shown, up to a megabyte of it.
• Native on Apple silicon and IntelOne download, native on both, for macOS 13 or later.

Line numbers and the scroller

• Absolute, relative or hybrid numbersThe caret's line absolute and the rest counted from it, for the people who move by counts.
• Numbers set in tabular figuresWhich matters the moment the editor is not in a monospaced font.
• The scroller is a mapSearch hits, changes against HEAD, bookmarks, errors and warnings are all drawn down its track. Clicking the track goes there.

Minimap and wrapping

• Minimap, one row per lineThe shape of the code beside the code, with bookmarks down one edge and search hits down the other.
• It says where you are pointingLine 412 · Server.start — the line number and what encloses it.
• Soft wrap, on by default⌥⌘W turns it off. Continuation rows keep the line's own indentation, so wrapped code keeps its shape.
• Wrapped text still behavesPage Up and Page Down move a page, End goes to the end of the row, a resize keeps what you were looking at, and the caret never slips off the bottom.
• Wrap at a columnSettings ▸ Editor ▸ Wrap at column: lines break at 80, or wherever you choose, rather than at the window's edge.

What a file is, from its bytes

• A file is recognised by what is in itWhen the name says one thing and the contents another, it says so on opening — with the extension such a file usually has.
• A picture opens as a picturePNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, BMP and icons, with the format and size — and a way back to the bytes.
• File ▸ Byte Order MarkTurn the mark at the front of a file on or off; ticked when there is one, and ⌘Z takes it back.
• No byte order mark where it breaks thingsNever written into .htaccess or a script with a #! line unless you ask — and opening one that has it says so.
• Changing the character set can be undone⌘Z puts back the set the bytes were read as.

Character sets

• Detection that scores every setByte order mark, then structure, then language scoring, then the 8-bit code pages — sampled at the head, the middle and the tail, because a log can change halfway.
• It tells the lookalikes apartWindows-1252 from Mac Roman, Latin-2 from Latin-1, KOI8-R from Windows-1251 — the pairs every "does it decode?" detector gets wrong.
• A short file is not ChineseA handful of accented bytes in a French or Russian note is read as what it is, not as three ideographs.
• Compare Character Sets…The same bytes read every way, side by side, scored — for the file the detector cannot settle. Only the sets that can genuinely read those bytes are offered.
• Reinterpret, or convert on saveChoosing a set asks which you meant: read the same bytes again, or write the text out in that set.
• Nothing becomes a ? without a wordA character the chosen set cannot spell is reported before it is lost, not after.
• 62 EBCDIC code pagesWestern and Central Europe, the Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Devanagari.
• Japanese mainframe files, Kanji and allEBCDIC 930, 939, 1390 and 1399 — and the shift-out and shift-in runs put back exactly where they belong on save.
• Library records in MARC-8Accents shown as one character so a search finds them, and written back the way a MARC 21 record needs — lengths and directory kept valid.
• Six-bit codes, older than EBCDICIBM's BCD, GBCD, Burroughs, CDC and the rest — chosen from a list, because nothing in such a file says which it is.
• And the rarer standardsISO/IEC 6937, KOI-7, JIS X 0208, and JIS X 0213 in both its wrappings.
• The character-set menu is yours to setTick the sets that belong in it; the rest stay one level down, grouped by region rather than in a flat list of fifty-eight.
• A file named for its set is read as itpayroll.ebcdic, MASTER.CP273, extract.ibm-1047 — believed about EBCDIC, doubted about everything else.
• UTF-16 and UTF-32, in and outOpened as text, written back in the encoding they came in, and what nobody touched is written back byte for byte.
• volt --encodingPrints what it decided and why, with the runners-up and their scores behind --verbose.
• Repair Garbled Charactersé and ’, read in the wrong character set once and saved that way, are é and ’ again.

Compressed files

• A .gz opens as its textA rotated log, a dump, a config out of a backup — read, edited and saved as a .gz again.
• bzip2, Zstandard and xz too.bz2, .zst and .xz open and save exactly as .gz does, with nothing to install.
• Several members read as one textAppended logs, cat a.gz b.gz, anything bgzip writes — one document, not a refusal.
• The inner file decides everythingnginx.conf.gz is highlighted as an nginx configuration and dump.sql.bz2 as SQL, each with the icon it would have without the wrapper.
• The bytes decide, not the nameA compressed file is unpacked whatever it is called, and a file saved without the extension comes out plain — the only way to unwrap one from inside an editor.
• Saved as hard as it cameA file packed at the strongest setting is packed that way again.

Logs

• A log is recognised by its linesNot by its name — from the way its first two hundred lines start.
• Every line coloured for what is in itThe time, the level, addresses, identifiers, HTTP methods, exceptions, key=value pairs and durations.
• Errors red, warnings amberMarked down the scroller as well, and the stack trace under an error belongs to the record above it.
• Show Only ErrorsAnd errors and warnings — a filter that keeps each record's own lines with it.
• Go to Time…The first line at or after a moment: 14:03, a full date, or +5m and -1h from the line you are on.
• A file that grows is followedNew lines are added to what is on screen rather than the file being read again.

Line endings

• LF, CRLF, CR — and mixed files reportedConverted in the same pass that reads the character set.
• NEL, LS, PS, VT, FF and LFCRNine endings in all, including the ones from mainframes and from Unicode itself — files that open as one enormous line everywhere else.
• A form feed is a page markIt only counts as a line ending in a file that plainly uses it as one.
• A final newline, if you want oneOff by default, and when it is on it appears in the window as an ordinary, undoable edit.

The file on disk

• It notices when a file changesModified, truncated, replaced or deleted — with nothing unsaved it reloads by itself and keeps your caret and scroll position.
• Locked and read-only files say soIn the title bar, before a save fails — and a lock is Volt's to undo, so Save offers to unlock.
• The File menu does the Finder's workReveal in Finder, Copy Path and Copy Relative Path, Save a Copy…, Rename…, Move To…, Move to Trash, Reopen Last Closed Window.
• Volt is in Open With for any fileAlways as an alternate, never taking a file away from the application it belongs to.
• Quick Look in the FinderThe space bar on a file gives Volt's own reading — records, character set, line endings — where the system's preview shows a wall of question marks. Gzip files are read too.
• Drag a file into the textIts path is typed, relative to the document; Markdown writes a link or an image, HTML writes a tag, CSS writes url().
• A filetype icon in front of each nameIn the project sidebar and in Go to Anything, grouped by what a file is for.
• Project ReportWhat every file in the project is — character set, byte order mark, line ending, final newline, and what a hygiene scan found — filtered to Not UTF-8, Not LF, Something wrong.
• Save when you walk awaySwitching window or application writes the file, if you turn it on — and it refuses where refusing is right.
• Text that never was a filegit diff | volt opens the diff in a window, highlighted as a diff.
• Normalise UnicodeNFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD, over the selection or the document.
• Files only an administrator may change/etc/hosts, /etc/sudoers: opened and saved with the system's own password dialog.
• Open a web addressOpen Remote fetches a file over HTTP or HTTPS and opens it under its own name.
• New File from the FinderA right click in the Finder makes an empty text, Markdown, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, Python or shell file where you are.
• When another app changes a fileSettings ▸ Files decides: reload it, ask what to do, or keep the version in Volt.
• Opens .txt and .log filesDouble-clicked text and log files open in Volt from its first launch; Settings ▸ Files shows what opens them.
• Composed or decomposedThe status bar shows whether accented letters are composed (NFC), decomposed (NFD) or mixed, with a menu to convert the document.
• One password per administrator sessionA file only an administrator may change asks for the password at its first save, not at every save after it, until its window closes.
• sudo volt /etc/hostsOpens the file in the Volt you are running, ready to save as an administrator with the password sudo asked for.

Records

• IBM RDW recordsVariable-length records with their four-byte descriptor word are recognised by following the chain, not by guessing.
• Fixed-width records80 columns from a card, 133 from a printer — turned into lines on the way in, with the padding taken off.
• The window says what it readBecause what is on screen is Volt's reading of the file: it saves lines, not records.
• EBCDIC with an ASCII line feedThe half-converted file that comes off a mainframe through the wrong tool still reads as lines.

Fixed-width fields

• Field Widths…Type the widths the way a copybook writes them — 3 15 10 20 20 20 3 10 40 — and a hairline is ruled down each boundary.
• Detect from FileWorks the columns out from the runs of padding that every record shares.
• Fields as CSV in a New DocumentEach record cut at its field widths, the padding taken off — or tab-separated, behind ⌥.
• Named layouts, remembered3 id, 15 surname, 10 first name — and the layout is offered again for the next file like this one.

Hex editor

• Show Hex Editor (⌃⌘X)Offsets, the bytes in groups of eight, the printable characters beside them — in the pane beside the text.
• The bytes are editableThe caret stands between two bytes; type hex digits and they go in. Selections, cut, copy, paste and one shared undo with the text.
• Overwrite Mode for patchingTyping changes a byte instead of inserting one — what patching a file without moving anything after it means.
• It follows the caretMove in the text and the dump moves to the same place; 64 KB at a time, with an offset field that takes hex or decimal.
• It says when the bytes are not the file'sA UTF-16, EBCDIC or packed file is edited as UTF-8 and written back in its own form, and the pane tells you so.

Over SSH

• File ▸ Open Remote…user@host:/etc/nginx.conf, and the file is in a window. ⌘S writes it back.
• It lists the directory as you typeBecause nobody knows the whole path past the first time.
• Asked for a password once, not three timesAnd kept in the login keychain if you ask it to.
• rmate config.yml on a serverOpens the file here, over the SSH session you are already in. The script ships with the editor.
• It says what it is doingEach step while a file is fetched and while it goes back — and a save that does not arrive says so rather than failing quietly.
• A dropped connection loses nothingThe save is written beside the real file and moved into place, so half a file is never what is left.
• A remote window comes back tomorrowRemembered by web1:/etc/nginx.conf rather than by a temporary path that will be gone.
• Search a project on another machineFind and Replace in Project, and search by shape, work on a project opened over SSH or SFTP — the whole project there is searched.

FTP and SFTP

• Drag and drop, both waysFiles and whole folders, out to the Finder and in from it — and Option-drag copies instead of moving, as it does in the Finder.
• Synchronise…A folder here and one on a server compared by size and date, with every step listed before anything happens. One way at a time, and nothing is ever deleted that you were not shown.
• A stopped transfer picks up where it left offOnly the part that is missing goes, in either direction.
• Permissions…Read, write and execute for owner, group and everyone, with the number beside it — and a default for new files and folders, so a page is never uploaded where the web server will not serve it.
• Rename by Rule…Replace text, add before or after, number them, change the case — with the new names on screen before anything is renamed.
• Compress on the servergzip, bzip2, xz, Zstandard, Zip, Tar or RAR — packed where it lies; tar, RAR and 7-Zip archives unpacked on this Mac.
• Places, a sidebar of servers, and the last folderThe folders worth one click kept with each server, a dot for the one connected, and the window opens where you left it.
• Copy Web AddressTell a server where its files are served from, and a file copies as the link somebody will open.
• Open in Terminal, Show Hidden FilesFor an SSH connection, a Terminal in the folder you are looking at; and the .htaccess and .env a server is often opened for.
• Activity and TranscriptWhat has been fetched and sent, and what passed between here and the server.
• A speed limit per serverFor when the upload is also the connection you are working over.
• An SSH key per serverFor the machine that is not in ~/.ssh/config.
• Nothing is written over by accidentA name that is taken is named, and Replace has to be asked for.
• File ▸ FTP…Your servers down one side, what is on the picked one down the other — for the shared host or the appliance that has no shell at all.
• SFTP is the same windowA saved connection can be one over SSH, or an sftp:// link.
• Plain FTP, or FTP over TLSExplicit or implicit, with passive mode — the one that works from behind a router.
• A connection is saved onceName, server, port, user, the folder to start in. The password goes to the login keychain, not into a settings file.
• The folders behave like a Finder windowA source list, kept until Refresh, because each listing is a login and a round trip.
• New folder, rename, deleteOn the right-click menu — and the delete says plainly that a server has no Trash.
• Saving goes up under its own nameAnd is renamed over the file once every byte is there.
• Several servers at onceEvery FTP window is a tab — ⌘T opens another connection — and files are dragged straight from one server to another.
• Through a jump hostA server reached only through another machine says so, and Volt goes that way.
• Search in a folder on the serverFind and replace across a folder on the server, in a window of its own.
• Quick Look on the serverThe space bar previews a file on the server.
• A transfer queueDownloads, uploads, compressing and synchronising wait their turn in an order you can drag, with a pause.
• Renames that can be undoneOn the server and on this Mac, with Undo and Redo.
• This Mac beside the serverYour Mac on one side and the server on the other — the same path bar, listing and search on both, and the Finder's commands on your side.

Together, through iCloud Drive

• File ▸ Share…For a file in iCloud Drive, the people you invite get the same file and edit it with you.
• Their changes arrive as they saveMerged into the text on screen; yours stay, and your caret keeps its place.
• Marked in the gutter, by nameEvery line a merge brought in, with who changed it when you point at it.
• A save never writes over something newerWhen two Macs saved at once, both versions come into the window with every difference marked.

• Undo survives quittingAnd closing the window: bring it back and its last steps come back with it, whether it held a file or only what you had typed.
• Unsaved work survives quittingAnd closing the window, and a crash, and a forced quit. It is written as you type, not at the end.
• A draft that was never a file is kept tooThe window that was never saved comes back with what was in it.
• A window that shows what is heldEvery draft Volt is keeping, in one list, so nothing is held in secret.
• Letting go of a draft means the wastebasketDiscarding is an explicit act with a sound, not a silent deletion.
• A big file is kept tooThe rule does not stop applying because the file is inconvenient.
• Come back to exactly what you leftOpen files, caret, selection, scroll position, character set, language, window size and split, restored on the next launch.
• Edit ▸ Browse History…A document's past on a timeline, as Time Machine does: every step of Undo and Redo, and the versions Volt keeps — go back to any point without losing what came after.
• A version every minute, saved or notKept while a document changes: every one from the last hour, then one an hour and one a day. Every save is kept as a version too.
• A deleted file can be put backFrom the last version Volt kept of it — offered when it is found missing, in Open Recent and in the Dock.
• When quitting: keep, ask or saveSettings ▸ Files decides what quitting does with unsaved changes: keep them for next time, ask, or save them.
• Save automaticallyEvery file with unsaved changes saved every minute, or every few minutes, if you want it.
• A backup before savingThe version on disk kept just before a save replaces it — in Volt's backups folder, or beside the file.
• Compare with SavedWhat has changed since the last save, beside the file as it is on disk — and one change at a time can be put back.

Every day

• Multiple cursors and block editing⌥-click adds a cursor, ⌥-drag makes a rectangle, ⌃⇧↑/↓ add one above or below, ⌘D selects the next occurrence — and the whole batch is one undo step.
• Undo, a word at a timeNot a burst at a time: ⌘Z after a sentence takes back a word, not the sentence.
• Toggle Comment (⌘/)The language's own token, at the shallowest indentation so the markers line up — and the block form when the selection is inside one line.
• Move, duplicate and delete lines⌥⌘↑/↓, ⇧⌘D, ⌃⌘K — and New Line Below (⌘↩) and Above (⇧⌘↩), indented to match.
• Shift Left and Right (⌘[ / ⌘])And Tab and ⇧Tab over a selection that spans lines.
• Paste with Indentation (⇧⌘V)Moves what you paste to where you are pasting it. Plain ⌘V still pastes exactly what was copied.
• Paste from History (⌥⇧⌘V)What was cut or copied lately, searchable — with pins for the signature or the boilerplate you paste every day.
• Drag text to move itInside a document that is one undoable change; between windows, the text leaves one and arrives in the other.
• Overwrite ModeThe Insert key, or the Edit menu.
• ⌘C with nothing selected takes the lineThe way every editor people arrive from behaves — and it can be turned off.
• Several selections at once⌘-drag adds a selection and ⌘-double-click a word; the text commands change every selection together, as one Undo.
• Writing ToolsApple Intelligence proofreads and rewrites what is selected, from the Edit menu and the right-click menu.
• Markdown lists that continue themselvesReturn continues lists, task lists and quotes and ends them on an empty item; Tab and ⇧Tab move an item in and out.
• Emmet abbreviationsul>li*3, div#main.box or m10-20 expand with Tab in HTML and CSS, with tab stops for what is left to fill in.
• Spelling as you typeWith the Mac's own dictionaries, in the languages you write: prose word for word, and in code only comments and strings — never names like camelCase.
• Paste as MarkdownWhat you copied from a web page, a mail, Google Docs or Word, as Markdown: headings, links, pictures, lists, quotations, code and tables.
• Paste JSON as TypesJSON on the clipboard as the types it decodes into, in the document's language: Swift structs, TypeScript interfaces, Go structs, Python TypedDicts, Kotlin data classes or Rust serde structs.
• Paths complete as you typeA / in a string or in a Markdown link lists the files and folders there, and a folder accepted goes on into it.
• A pasted picture lands beside the fileA screenshot pasted into a Markdown file is saved as a PNG next to it, with a link to it where the caret is.
• A table of contents that keeps upInsert Table of Contents lists a Markdown file's headings as links, and every save keeps it up to date.
• Drop a file in to put in its textFiles dragged in with ⌥ held put in their text, each read in its own character set; with ⇧, their full paths.
• Smart quotes and dashes in proseIn Markdown and plain text, never in code, with your Mac's text replacements — turned on in Edit ▸ Spelling and Substitutions, and ⌘Z gives back what you typed.

Lines, numbers and case

• Sort lines the way a list is sortedNatural order — line 10 after line 9 — as well as plain, reversed, and by the columns a block of cursors spans.
• Remove duplicates, empties and repeatsThe first of each kept, or only consecutive ones, as uniq does.
• Join Lines, Split Lines At…Turn a, b, c into three lines, each with the indentation of the line it came from.
• Rewrap ParagraphsThe selected lines, or the paragraph the caret is in — never a whole file of code by accident.
• Increment and Decrement NumbersEvery number in the selection by one, or the one under the caret.
• Change Numbers…+ 5, − 3, × 1.1, ÷ 2 over every number in the selection.
• Convert to Decimal, Hex, Binary, OctalEvery whole number in the selection, or the one at the caret.
• A column of figures is added upSelect them and the status bar says Σ 60 · 3 numbers · average 20.
• Convert Case, eleven waysUPPERCASE, lowercase, Title, Sentence, iNVERT, UpperCamelCase, lowerCamelCase, kebab-case, snake_case, CONSTANT_CASE, dot.case.
• Statistics…Characters, words, lines and Unicode scalars, over the selection or the document.
• Checksums, and a hash for every functionSHA-256, SHA-512, SHA-1 and MD5 at once — and Hash Selection replaces the selection with any of twenty-one: SHA-256, CRC-32, xxHash and the rest, with the old ones marked insecure.
• Encode and DecodeHTML, URL, Base64 and the rest, over the selection or the document, both ways.
• Insert DateISO 8601 at every cursor, or your own pattern from Settings.
• Redact SelectionEvery character becomes █, spaces and line breaks kept — so a log keeps its shape when you send it on.
• Clean Up URLA path or an address in lower case, with umlauts written out and spaces as hyphens: /Menü-Über-uns.jpg becomes /menue-ueber-uns.jpg.
• CSV to TSV, and backFor the selection or the whole document, with quoted fields kept intact.
• Look Up, Translate, Search With GoogleA right click on a word offers the Mac's own services — and Copy with Syntax Highlighting, Copy as XHTML and Share.
• Calculate (⌃⌘=)Arithmetic in the text worked out: 17.5*3+12 becomes 64.5 — with brackets, powers, percentages, √, π, and decimal commas where the text uses them.
• Align (⌥⌘A)Lines up the selected lines on what they share — the = of assignments, the : of keys, the bars of a Markdown table — or on a separator you name.
• Prefix and Suffix Lines…Text before and after every line, or taken off again: a column of names made 'ann', 'bo', in one go.
• Straighten Quotes, Typographic QuotesCurly quotes made straight for code, or straight ones curled the English, German, Swiss or French way.
• JSON, YAML and CSV, into each otherSort JSON Keys, JSON to YAML and back, CSV to JSON and back — numbers kept as numbers only where a whole column is, so postcodes keep their zeros.

Selection, brackets and tags

• Move through the parts of a name⌃⌥← and ⌃⌥→ walk parse, HTTP, Server, 2 in parseHTTPServer2, and the words of snake_case.
• Expand Selection (⌃⇧⌘→)Grows by the text's own structure: the word, the dotted name, the string, the call, the block.
• Matching brackets, tags and commentsBoth halves boxed, or neither — including the two ends of a block comment.
• Change or remove the brackets around itAnd move to the next bracket in the file with ⌃⌘] and ⌃⌘[.
• Tags close themselvesIn HTML, XML, Markdown, PHP and JSX — and it knows when not to: void elements, comments, doctypes, generics.
• Wrap Selection in Tag… (⌃⌘T)The selection stays selected, so wrapping twice works.
• Open SelectionOpens what the selection names — a web address in the browser, a file in Volt.
• Read Only for All DocumentsEvery window at once, for reading a set of files without a stray keystroke.
• Undo Selection (⌥⌘Z)Steps back through where the caret and the selection have been, without touching the text; Redo Selection goes forward again.
• Tags rename in pairsRenaming an opening tag renames the one that closes it as you type — one step of Undo for both.

Indentation

• Return indents by the language's rulesOne level in after a brace or a colon, and pulled back out when the line closes one.
• A file's own indentation is adoptedTabs, or 2, 4 or 8 spaces, for that document alone — shown in the status bar.
• Convert Indentation to Spaces or TabsKeeping where each line starts.
• Tab width and indent width are two numbersThe same by default, and separable for the files where they are not.
• Tab stop linesA faint line at every tab stop, from View ▸ Show and Hide or Settings.
• Indentation coloursEach level of indentation tinted a colour of its own, and an indentation that is not a whole number of levels marked in red.

The find bar

• Literal or ICU regular expressionsWith case, whole words, wrap-around and $1 templates in the replacement.
• Escape sequences\n, \t, \xHH and \uXXXX in both fields, without turning on regular expressions.
• Find AllOne pass gives the total, the first 10,000 matches as a clickable list, and markers down the scroller.
• Markers sampled across the whole fileNot taken from the first few matches — in a big log that is the difference between a map and a smudge at the top.
• It says how far it has gotSearching… 42%, with the elapsed time on anything slower than half a second, and a Stop button.
• Replace All is undoableEven on a mapped file — nothing is written to disk until you save.
• Search in SelectionLimits Find Next, Find All and Replace All to what was selected when you switched it on.
• Preserve Case When Replacingword becomes name, WORD becomes NAME, Word becomes Name.
• The last search, anywhereShared with every other Mac application through the system's find pasteboard.
• Find in Recent Files (⌃⌘F)The files you had open lately, wherever they live.
• The fields take line breaksSo a two-line pattern is typed as two lines.
• Find & Replace in a window of its ownFields big enough for long patterns and replacements over several lines, every option in sight — and Extract Matches puts every match in a new document.
• Find ▸ Pattern Playground…A regular expression tried on a text: every match marked, its groups listed, and the replacement shown done.
• Regular expressions in colourGroups, escapes, classes, repeats and anchors coloured in the find field, and the groups the replacement puts back.
• Find with XPath…Selects what an XPath expression finds in XML; Copy XPath — Copy JSON Path in JSON — copies the path of whatever the caret is in.

Counting, marking, filtering

• Count Matches42 matches on 30 lines, with nothing opened and nothing moved.
• Tally MatchesEvery match counted by what it says, most frequent first, in a new document.
• Mark All MatchesKeeps a search painted in one of five colours while other searches come and go — three things to watch in a log is three markers.
• Show Only Matching Lines (⌥⌘L)grep, still in its window: the lines keep their numbers and stay editable.
• Hide Matching Lines (⌥⇧⌘L)The other way round, and the two combine — show the errors, hide the ones you have seen.
• Filter Lines…Several conditions at once, each one a switch, and saved filters you can turn on together.
• A filter outlasts a rotated logWhen the file is written again, the filter is still on.
• Find TODO CommentsThe TODO, FIXME, HACK, XXX and BUG comments of the file, or of the whole project, in a list — and marked in the text.

Across a project

• Find in Project (⇧⌘F)The same engine and the same results list, over every file of the project.
• Replace in Project (⇧⌘H)Searches first, says how many matches in how many files, and only then writes.
• File Filter…Include and exclude lists in the patterns you already know — *.swift, Sources/, *.{js,ts} — and a replace obeys the same filter.
• Find in Open Documents (⌥⌘F)Every window as it is now, unsaved changes and untitled windows included.
• Structural searchCode with holes in it: print(:[what]) finds every call however long its argument, if (:[cond]) { :[body] } finds the whole statement. The same holes put it back in the replacement.
• Replace in Open Documents…Every open document at once, after saying how many matches in how many documents; each window takes its change as one Undo.
• One search, everywhereFind All lists every match in this document, the project, every open document and the files opened lately, file by file.

Batch replace and saved searches

• Batch Replace…A list of pairs — what a spreadsheet puts on the clipboard when two columns are copied — run in one go, with each pair's own switches.
• Over every open documentEach document's changes one undo step in its own window — and Count says what would happen without changing anything.
• Lists you keepA house style's spellings, a migration's renames, saved under a name.
• Searches worth keepingSaved with their options, because a regular expression brought back without "Regular Expression" on is a literal string that finds nothing.
• On every Mac you useYour saved searches, language modes and snippets follow an account, merged rather than overwritten when two Macs save at once.

• Go to Anything (⌥⌘P)@name for symbols, :123 for a line, anything else for open documents and recent files.
• Commands… (⇧⌘P)Every command in the menus in one field, with the menu it sits under and its shortcut.
• An outline that needs no language serverBuilt from the same lexer that colours the text, so it works on files far too large for one.
• Jump to Definition (⌃⌘J) and Find UsagesOr ⌘-click.
• Outline sidebar and breadcrumbsThe sidebar follows the caret; each breadcrumb drops a menu of its siblings.
• HTML and XML have an outline tooBecause a page is read by its headings.
• Go to Line… (⌘L)Takes 12:5 for line and column, a byte offset, and BBEdit's forms — :C for a character, ranges, +N and -N — because a line number is not the only thing a person is told.
• Bookmarks, with notes⌥⌘M marks a line, the number is drawn on a tag in the gutter, and Bookmark with Note… says why. They move with the text as you edit.
• Bookmark Shown LinesFilter to the errors, mark them, show the file again — and the marks are where the errors were.
• Back and forward (⌃⌘← / ⌃⌘→)Records jumps, not arrow keys: a move of fewer than twelve lines is typing, not travelling.
• Scope headerThe definition you are inside, pinned above the text as its own first line scrolls away — keeping its real line number.
• Code foldingFrom braces, from indentation, and from a language's own markers, with a ribbon down the gutter showing every region in view. Folds are per pane.
• Jump to Selection (⌘J)Back to where the caret is, after the view has wandered off.
• Jump to Word (⌃J)A letter or two on every word on the screen: type them and the caret is there — with ⇧ to select, with ⌥ to add a cursor.
• Compare with ClipboardThe document, or the selection, side by side with what is on the clipboard.
• Compare Folders…What differs between two folders — files on one side only, files whose contents differ — and a double click shows two of them side by side.

Highlighting

• Everything you work inSwift, C/C++/Objective-C, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, Java, Kotlin, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Lua, Shell, SQL, CSS, SCSS, HTML, Markdown, YAML, JSON, TOML and the rest.
• And what the mainframe runsCOBOL, JCL, RPG in both forms, ABAP, PL/SQL, Delphi, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, SAS.
• And the newer onesMojo (.mojo and .🔥), Zig, Nix, Julia, Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Ada, Fortran, Tcl, R, PowerShell.
• The files that build the softwareMakefile, Dockerfile, CMake, Terraform/HCL, Gradle, Bazel — read as themselves rather than as shell scripts.
• Servers and their configurationApache and .htaccess, nginx, Caddyfile, crontab, SSH config.
• CSV and TSV get a mode of their ownNot a language, and worth colouring: where the fields end and which one you are in.
• Templates lex as what they holdERB, EEx, EJS, PHP-HTML, Jinja, Nunjucks, Twig, Liquid, Handlebars, Mustache and Go templates — the page as a page, each tag as its own language.
• HTML with other languages in it<script> is JavaScript and <style> is CSS, with their own comments and strings.
• Strings with code in themThe expression inside "\(name.count)" or ${a + 1} is lexed as the code it is — and only where that delimiter really interpolates.
• Heredocs<<EOF, <<~EOF, <<'EOF' and PHP's <<<EOT — and a << b is still a shift.
• Character references, right and wrongé is marked as what it is and &nsbp; as the mistake it is.
• Bracket colours by depthSo the one that closes the line you are on is obvious.
• No extension, no problemThe words in the file decide, and a #! line is read — a script called deploy is what its first line says it is.
• A new file works out what it is turning intoPaste a page of Python into an untitled window and the window is a Python window.
• .m is Objective-C and it is MATLABNo rule about names can tell them apart, so the file itself is asked.
• CSV columns in colours of their ownEach column drawn in its own colour down every row, and the status bar names the column the caret is in from the header.
• Comments that mean somethingA comment starting with ! is drawn in red, with ? in blue and with * in green: a warning, a question, something to notice.
• DNS zone filesEach record's name, TTL, class, type and data coloured as what it is — a host called mx is a name, not a type — in .zone files and BIND's db.example.com.

Per language, per project

• Settings ▸ LanguagesIndentation, wrapping, formatter, linter and character set per language — each control with a Default that means "whatever the settings say".
• .editorconfig is readindent_style, indent_size, tab_width, end_of_line, charset, trim_trailing_whitespace, insert_final_newline — and the project has the last word.
• .gitattributes tootext, eol=lf|crlf and working-tree-encoding, after .editorconfig.
• New files in a language can have their own rulesLine endings and character set, decided per language.

• Language servers, when you want themDiagnostics as you type, completion, hover documentation (⌃⌘H), Rename Symbol (⌃⌘R) and code actions — off until you switch a language on, because nobody should get a long-running process by opening a file.
• A rename says what it will touch firstHow many changes, in how many files, and how many of those are not open.
• Signature helpThe signature above the line with the parameter you are on in bold — and it never takes the keyboard.
• Find Symbol in Project… (⌥⇧⌘O)The names a server knows anywhere in the project.
• Completion, with or without a serverFrom the server when one is running, otherwise from the words already in the file, ranked by how often and how near they are.
• It never covers what you are typingAnd typing carries on into the document underneath the list.
• Snippets with stops and variablesTab between the stops, $TM_FILENAME, $CLIPBOARD and the rest by the names other editors use — and a number used twice is one stop in two places.
• Linting (⌃⌘L)Defaults for swiftlint, ruff, eslint, go vet, clippy, shellcheck, cppcheck, rubocop, yamllint and markdownlint; anything else is a command you configure.
• Findings in four placesA dot in the gutter, a mark down the scroller, the message on the line, and the list — which opens itself only when you asked for the check.
• A language server's coloursWhere a language server runs, its idea of which names are types, functions or macros replaces Volt's guess from the words.
• Inlay hints, after the codeThe type a language server worked out for a name, or an argument's name, shown after the line — so the code itself never moves.
• SQL is formatted tooFormat Document puts SQL a clause a line, with its columns and conditions indented under it and strings and comments exactly as they were.

• Git ▸ Repository… (⇧⌘0)One window for the repository: what has changed, what happened before, the branches, and what was put aside.
• Stage a file, or one change in itTick a file, or put the caret in a change and Stage This Hunk — then write the message, amend if you want to, and commit with ⌘↩.
• Throw away one change on its ownWithout touching the rest of the file.
• History, for the repository or one fileThe files each commit touched, the difference for whichever you pick, search by message, author, change or hash — and put a file back as any commit left it.
• BranchesLocal and those only on the server; switch, start, delete, and see how far ahead or behind each one is.
• StashPut the working copy aside, new files included, read what is in it, and give it back — kept in the list or not.
• Fetch, Pull and PushWhat is waiting to come and go, said in one line. A pull that would have to merge is refused in Git's own words rather than decided for you.
• Merge conflicts, settled in the editorGit ▸ Conflicts walks through them: keep what is here, what arrived, or both. A file still holding markers says so.
• The file list marks what has changedA letter beside each name, and on the folders above it.
• Change bars against HEADAdded, modified, and a wedge where lines were deleted — in the gutter and down the scroller.
• Outside a repository, against its saved selfSo the marks mean something in any file you edit.
• The branch, and how many lines differIn the status bar, with Next and Previous Change (⌃⌘↓ / ⌃⌘↑).
• A moved block reads as a moveNot as every brace realigned.
• Revert ChangePuts the hunk under the caret back to what HEAD says, as one ordinary undoable edit — nothing written to disk.
• Show BlameWho last touched each line and when, labelled once per run — or ⌃⌘B for just the line you are on.
• Compare with Revision…Then and now in two panes, rows aligned, with Take Left to bring a difference back.
• Compare with File…Two files that are not versions of one another, unsaved changes included.
• Show Changes (⌃⌘D)The diff against HEAD as a patch, in a window — highlighted, folded and listed like any other file.
• The project is what Git says it isGo to Anything and the files sidebar list the repository's files, so .gitignore decides and a build folder is not in your way.
• Stage single linesSelect some lines of a change and stage only those — or take them back out.
• Clone a repositoryCopied from a server into a folder on this Mac, with its history and its README opened when it is there.
• A branch graphWhere branches part, run side by side and join again, drawn beside the commits.
• Git ▸ History of Selected Lines…Every commit that changed the selected lines, following them as they moved about the file.
• Tags and commit notesTags in the branches list, an annotated tag's message, and notes on commits shown under their message.
• Put some files asideRight-click files in the list of changes and Put Aside… keeps just those out of the way while the rest is committed.
• Undo the last commitWhile it has not been pushed: its changes are staged again and its message put back, ready to commit differently.
• Diffs that mark what changed in a lineA changed line shows the part that actually changed, on green and red bands with each line's numbers beside it.
• Copy Link to Selected LinesA link to those lines on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Codeberg, at the commit you are on, so it keeps showing the same lines.

• Format Document (⌥⇧⌘F)Through the formatter you configured for that language — and only the part that differs is replaced, so your caret and scroll position survive it.
• Format before savingPer language, if you want it.
• Minify JSONWith no tool at all.
• Filter Through Command (⌃⌘U)Pipes the selection — or the document — through a shell command and replaces it with what came back. A command that fails changes nothing and says why.
• Commands run in a login shellSo Homebrew and nvm tools are found, and a missing one is named rather than reported as a generic failure.
• Run Script (⌘R)Runs the document with its language's interpreter — python3, ruby, perl, node, osascript — and what is on screen is what runs.
• Compile Script…Writes the .scpt that Automator, Folder Actions, Mail rules and the Script menu expect.
• Install Command Line Tool…Writes a volt command, after saying whether it will work — and asks for an administrator's password the way the system does.

Preview

• Code in a Markdown fence is highlightedIn the language the fence names — ```swift, ```py, ```bash — in the editor and in the preview.
• Markdown rendered as you type (⌘R)From the buffer, so it follows what you type without saving.
• HTML previewed from diskWith its own stylesheet, reloaded when you save.
• A CSV is previewed as the table it isOf any size — and the separator is read from the file, because a .csv from a German spreadsheet is as often semicolons.
• Plain text and RTF as a pageProportional type, a comfortable measure, line breaks kept.
• Clicking the preview goes to that place in the fileAnd the pane follows the caret the other way.
• A contents button in the pane's barEvery heading in the document, indented by level.
• Nothing is fetched from the networkJavaScript is off in the rendered page, and a clicked link opens in your browser rather than in the pane.
• Images shown under the line that names themIn Markdown, in CSS url(), in an src attribute, or a bare path in a comment.
• A JSON previewIndented, in the editor's colours, every object and array folding open and shut with a click — comments and trailing commas taken in their stride.
• Markdown as GitHub reads itPlus Obsidian's callouts and [[links]], emoji by name, ==highlights==, definition lists and front matter.
• Print the previewThe page as it is rendered — headings, tables, pictures and coloured code.
• Jupyter notebooks, as notebooksMarkdown cells as text, code cells coloured with their run numbers, and what each run printed and drew: plots as pictures, tables as tables, tracebacks in red.
• A CSV table you can type intoPick a cell in the preview and type: Return puts it into the file and goes down, Tab goes right, and quotes are added where a value needs them.
• Open in BrowserView ▸ Open in Browser shows the page in your browser, with its developer tools, and reloads it whenever a file of its folder changes.

Printing and copying out

• Print… (⌘P) and Export as PDF…With the file's colours, optional line numbers, the name at the top of every page and the page number at the foot.
• The page header can be turned offAs can the date beside it.
• Printing uses the light themeWhatever the editor is set to — a dark theme on white paper is a black rectangle — and prints the selection when there is one.
• Copy with Syntax Highlighting (⌥⌘C)RTF, HTML and plain text at once, so it keeps its colours in Pages, Word or a mail message.
• Colour swatches, and a pickerEvery #hex, rgb() and hsl() gets a bar in its own colour, and Edit Colour… writes your choice back in the notation it was found in.
• volt --pdf file out.pdfThe same PDF, from the command line.
• Settings ▸ PrintingThe font, the header with the file's name or path and a date, a frame round the text, and colours — automatic, black and white, or any theme.
• Copy with StylesCode on the clipboard with its colours and its background, for pasting into Mail.
• Insert Colour…The colour picker writes the colour you pick at the caret as #rrggbb.
• Copy As ▸ ImageThe selected lines on the clipboard as a picture in the editor's font and colours, for a chat or a slide; File ▸ Export ▸ Image… saves it as a PNG.
• Export ▸ Word Document… and Web Page…Markdown as a Word file with Word's own headings, lists, tables and pictures, or as the preview's page with its pictures inside it.

• Clean Up Document… (⌥⇧⌘K)Says what is in the file that is not in the text, with a checkbox for each kind — and applies every ticked one as a single undoable change.
• Bidirectional controls are reported as errorsThey can reorder what a reader sees without changing what a compiler reads. That is an attack, not untidiness.
• What it refuses to remove is the pointA tab is text, a form feed is a page mark, and the joiners inside 👨‍👩‍👧 are what make it one emoji.
• Show Invisible CharactersSpaces as ·, an arrow inside each tab's own width, ¬ at a real end of line.
• The ones worth finding are marked as wrongA non-breaking or ideographic space, a soft hyphen, a zero-width character — what a word processor leaves in pasted text.
• Control characters are always shownEach drawn as a picture of its own name — ␀, ␇, ␡ — with its number over it if you ask.
• Trimming on saveTrailing whitespace, and the invisible half of the clean-up, on every save if you want it.
• Column guidesAt the columns your project cares about.
• Character Inspector (⌥⌘I)What a character actually is — or every one selected: code point, name, bytes in this file's character set, whether it is composed or decomposed, and how HTML writes it.

• Three themes, and yoursPaper (warm and light), Midnight (cold and dark) and Coffee (warm and dark), plus colour-blind-safe Light and Dark.
• A theme decides the whole windowTitle bar, the bars above and below the text, the sidebars — and the light or dark appearance follows.
• A theme editorEvery colour a theme has, grouped, as colour wells over a live sample of real code.
• Themes are plain JSON filesAnything you leave out is inherited, so a theme can be four lines long.
• Language modes are files tooKeywords, comments, string delimiters, indentation, folding and symbols — and a mode whose id matches a built-in language replaces it, which is how you add a keyword without waiting for a release.
• A mode can paint its own patternsA regular expression on top of what the scanner found — IP addresses in a log, ticket numbers in a comment.
• A theme can let the desktop throughTranslucency, from a slider or one line in the file.
• Any font on the machineAt any size — not only the monospaced ones.
• Font Features…Small capitals, old-style figures, alternates and rare ligatures — whatever the font you chose can do.
• Ligatures that come apart under the caretAn arrow you cannot see the halves of is a poor thing to edit.
• Letter spacingIn points, negative to pull the text together, with the guides following it.
• A status bar you chooseLine and column, lines and size, iCloud, the Git branch, mapped or in memory and the rest — shown or left out, as you like.
• Themes from other editorsImport… in the theme editor brings in a Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text or TextMate theme — the ones already on this Mac listed by name.
• Typewriter Scrolling and Focus ModeThe line being written stays in the middle of the window, and everything but the paragraph you are in can be dimmed.

• Split viewSide by side (⌥⌘S) or stacked (⌃⇧⌘S) — one document, but each pane keeps its own caret, scroll, folds and filters.
• Tabs, and windows, explicitly⌘T always tabs and ⌘N always opens a window — and Sort Tabs by Name or by Type puts them in order.
• A window can be two lines tallSmall enough to keep a log's last lines in the corner of the screen.
• What a window shows is that window's ownLine numbers, minimap, outline, breadcrumbs, blame, issues and invisibles — per window, not per application.
• A large session is usable at onceTwo hundred windows come back without the application going still.
• The session is written as you workNot only on a clean quit, so it survives a crash.
• A files sidebar (⌃⌘1)The project as a list, with a filter field at the foot, Finder's own row height, and the context menu you expect — Quick Look, Show in Finder, Rename, Duplicate, Compress, Move to Trash.
• My CommandsA menu of your own, made of any commands Volt has.
• A file on a share does not hold Volt stillWhen the server behind it has gone.
• Window ▸ Collapse to Title BarA window rolled up into its title bar and down again, with the line the caret was on shown beside its name.
• Every window comes backNot only documents: the repository window, a file's history, comparisons, the FTP window and the find window return after a relaunch.
• Each language its own markFiles carry their language's letters on its usual colour — SW, TS, PY, GO and more than sixty others — in the sidebar, in Go to Anything and on a window's tab.

• Increase Contrast is honouredEvery token colour is pushed away from the background until it meets the ratio.
• Colour-blind-safe themesLight and dark. Contrast cannot fix colour blindness; a different palette can.
• VoiceOverThe editor answers for itself as a text area — how many characters, what is on line n, where the insertion point is — and the rotor moves by definitions, bookmarks and issues.
• What a command says is said aloudBookmarked line 12, 42 matches — the notices that come and go at the bottom of the window.
• Accessibility Zoom follows the caretA magnified screen keeps up with where you are typing.
• English, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, EspañolThe whole interface, with numbers and sizes in the interface language too.
• Indent guides, at the strength you wantIncluding none.

• AppleScriptA real dictionary: documents expose name, path, text, selection, line count, encoding, line ending and language — and open, count, exists and quit work as they do in any Mac application.
• Scripted commandsselect line document 1 number 42, find document 1 for "needle" using regex true, replace…, and do menu command for anything else.
• Vim modeNormal, Insert, Visual, Visual Line and Visual Block, with counts, the usual motions, operators, registers, macros and . to repeat the last change.
• ⌘ always belongs to the menusAn editor that swallowed ⌘S because it was in Normal mode is an editor that loses work.
• Every command is rebindableSettings ▸ Keys lists them all, records a new shortcut by pressing it, and warns when the key is taken.
• Shortcuts live in a readable fileWritten as the symbols people already read, so it can go in your dotfiles.
• Actions for the Shortcuts appTwelve of them: open files, get or insert the front document's text, and transform, find, replace, count and compare text.
• Macros without VimStart Recording Macro (⌃Q) records typing, keys and menu commands, and Play Macro (⌃⇧Q) does them again.

• Volt Help (⌘?)Every feature there is, on one page, in a window of its own — offline.
• A command that cannot work says soGreyed out before it is clicked, with an honest sentence when you ask why: no language server for this file, this file is not in a repository, no changes to compare.
• Menus you can find things inThe small switches one level down, nothing in two places, and every shortcut where it always was.
• The status bar is four pickersCharacter set, line ending, language and indentation — each one a menu, each one saying what the document actually does.