Free beta

Your download is starting

If nothing happens in a moment, start it by hand. You are getting Volt-1.0-313.dmg — 7.4 MB, signed and notarised, for macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon.

Install it in three steps

Open the disk image that lands in your Downloads folder.
Drag Volt to Applications — the window shows you where.
Open it. It is signed and notarised by MarketVision AG, so macOS lets it straight through: no right-click, no Gatekeeper warning, no Terminal command.

Then eject the disk image. Nothing is installed anywhere else, and nothing runs in the background.

What the seven days mean

Each beta build runs for seven days from the day it was made, and every update gives another seven. Updates come most weeks, so in practice you keep a working editor by downloading the current build whenever you think of it — there is nothing to renew, no key to enter and no account to make. When a build does stop, it says so and your files are untouched.

Try these first

Three minutes that show you whether it is for you:

Open the biggest file you have. A log, a dump, an export — the size is the point.
Open something the last editor refused: a .gz, a mainframe extract, a file full of question marks. The status bar will tell you what it actually is.
Type something, then quit without saving and open Volt again. It is still there.

Where to go next

Everything it does — the complete list, searchable.
Every file it opens — languages, character sets, records.
What changed in this build.
Something wrong? One address, read by the people who write the code.

Hear when 1.0 ships

One email when it is released, and one question now: what should we build next? The beta moves quickly, and what people ask for is what gets built.

Checksum of this build (SHA-256): 6b0837ec6561dcb8d24fd0151eecdd0c88797c3117ea136827f3bab80ba006c2. Verify it with shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Volt-1.0-313.dmg.