13/03/2026

KlarText

Beauty in plain text. Klar is German for clear. Klartext reden means speaking plainly. KlarText is a multi-document plain-text editor with a strict no-extras policy: no syntax highlighting, no AI, no autosave. The app is live on the App Store.

Plain text is the only format that survived. WordPerfect files from 1985 are unreadable. Word documents from the 1990s are corrupted or stranded in formats nobody supports anymore. A .txt file written fifty years ago opens today, without conversion, without a subscription, without the original software. It will open fifty years from now.

KlarText follows the Unix philosophy of small, composable tools that solve a well-defined problem cleanly and don’t try to do too much. KlarText has zero dependencies (AppKit only).

Features

Paste and Reflow: Paste text from PDFs, emails, terminals, or the web. Hard-wrapped lines are rejoined into clean, flowing prose — while lists, code blocks, and shell sessions are left intact.

Join List as Prose: Turn a bullet or numbered list into a single flowing paragraph in one step. Each item becomes a sentence: capitalised, punctuated, ready.

Focus Mode: Wide margins, hidden sidebar. Full screen combinable.

All the features (see also the KlarText support page):

  • Proportional fonts — Georgia, Baskerville, and Helvetica — alongside your favorite monospace faces.
  • Fine-tune paragraph spacing with a new slider, and turn on continuation indent to keep wrapped lines neatly aligned.
  • Word Count — The status bar now shows your word count alongside lines and characters.
  • Highlight Current Line — A subtle background tint marks the line you’re editing, making it easy to keep your place. Toggle it in View or Settings > Text > Display.
  • Duplicate Line — Press Cmd+Shift+D to instantly duplicate the current line or selection.
  • Move Lines — Rearrange lines with Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down. Works with single lines or multi-line selections.
  • Sort Lines & Remove Duplicates — New text transforms in Edit > Text Transforms. Sort alphabetically (ascending or descending) or strip duplicate lines. Works on the selection or the entire document.
  • Wrap at Column — Hard-wrap text at 72, 80, 100, 120, or a custom column width via Edit > Wrap at Column. Preserves paragraph breaks and indentation.
  • Quick Open — Press Cmd+Shift+O to fuzzy-search your recent and open documents. Just start typing to find what you need.
  • Typewriter Scrolling — Keeps the cursor vertically centred as you type, for a focused writing experience. Enable it in View or Settings > Text > Display.
  • Session Restore — Optionally reopen all your documents from the previous session on launch. Enable in Settings > Editor > Session.
  • Paste and Reflow — Fixed a bug where Paste and Reflow did nothing when used immediately after switching documents. Also fixed the pasted text sometimes appearing in the wrong font.
  • File Type Support — Improved drag-and-drop onto the dock icon for CSS, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, Vue, Svelte, and many more file types.
  • KlarText has multi-document sidebar with inline rename, regex find & replace, line numbers, automatic encoding detection (UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin-1, Mac Roman), line ending conversion (LF / CRLF / CR).
  • Very useful is keyboard text navigation, also Go to Line, Delete Line, Block indent / outdent.