kayet

What makes it different

Every editor Piotr Wittchen tried kept showing him things: toolbars, sidebars, tabs, status bars, badges. He wanted the opposite — open the app, see only the text, and start writing. So he built kayet, a minimalistic text editor for macOS that hides everything except your text by default, including the title bar and traffic lights. Move the mouse to the top edge and the controls fade in; start typing and they fade out again.

Under the quiet surface it is a capable editor: Markdown with subtle syntax styling and a live side-by-side preview with scroll sync, lists that continue themselves, a command palette, fuzzy file finder and workspace-wide search, workspaces and tabs, and a code editor mode with line numbers and syntax highlighting. Seventeen bundled themes follow macOS light and dark automatically. Zen mode keeps the cursor line centered and dims everything except the current paragraph, presentation mode turns any Markdown file into slides with step-by-step reveal, and export produces a self-contained HTML page or a PDF.

kayet is built to stay light: written in Rust on Tauri 2 with CodeMirror 6 and no heavy frontend framework, it opens in about a third of a second, runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and updates itself. There are no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry and no plugins — your files are plain files on your disk. It is free and open source under Apache 2.0.