Volt
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Guides
The job you came here to do
Each guide answers one question in full — what the tools already on your Mac can do, where they stop, and what Volt adds. Start with the one that brought you here.
Switching editors
- Notepad++ for Mac: what to use insteadNotepad++ does not run on macOS. What its users miss on a Mac, the alternatives worth trying, and how Volt covers the Notepad++ habits one by one.
- Volt compared with other editorsBBEdit, Sublime Text, VS Code, Vim and less — including where Volt is the wrong choice.
Big files, logs and data
- How to open a large file on a MacWhat less, tail and split do, why most editors freeze, and a 4.23 GB log opened in 2 milliseconds.
- How to read a log file on a MacOpen a log of any size on macOS, follow it as it grows, colour it by level, filter to the errors, jump to a time — .gz logs included.
- How to open a large CSV file on a MacOpen a CSV of any size on macOS — past Excel's million rows — read it as a table, filter it, fix it and save it in the character set it came in.
- How to open and edit a .gz file on a MacOpen a .gz, .bz2, .zst or .xz on macOS as the text inside it, edit it and save it back compressed — no gunzip, no temporary copy.
Servers and Git
- An FTP and SFTP client for Mac that also editsFTP, FTP over TLS and SFTP on macOS: drag and drop with the Finder, sync a folder, resume transfers, set permissions — and edit any file in place.
- How to edit files on a server from your MacEdit files on a server from macOS: over SSH, from a shell you are in, over FTP and FTP over TLS, and over SFTP — with your own editor.
- A Git client for Mac, inside your editorStage single changes, commit and amend, read history, switch branches, stash, pull and push, settle conflicts — in the editor where the code is.
Clean text
- How to convert a file to UTF-8 on a MacFind out which character set a file is really in, convert it to UTF-8 on macOS without losing a letter, and fix files already full of question marks.
- How to convert line endings (CRLF and LF) on a MacSee which line endings a file uses, convert CRLF to LF and back on macOS, fix mixed files, and read the rarer endings — NEL, LS, PS — that break other tools.
- How to find invisible characters in a text file on a MacShow zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, stray byte order marks and bidirectional controls in a file on macOS — and remove the ones you choose.
- How to find and replace across many files on a MacSearch and replace text in every file of a folder on macOS — with include and exclude patterns, regular expressions and a count before anything is written.
Bytes and the mainframe
- A hex editor for macOS, beside the textLook at the bytes of a file on macOS, edit them, patch one in place and see the text change with them — in the same window, on files of any size.
- EBCDIC on macOSOpen, edit and convert EBCDIC: the code pages, the NEL line ending, and converting to UTF-8 and back.
- Mainframe files on a MacRDW and fixed-width records, COBOL copybooks and first-column comment rules.
Or skip the reading
Volt is in free beta. No account, no sign-up; each build runs for seven days and every update gives another seven.