A quiet place to write.

A free, open-source Markdown editor for Mac and Windows.
You write in clean, styled text, and every note stays a plain Markdown file on your own computer.

_{macOS  ·  Windows  ·  Free and open source  ·  No account  ·  Works offline  ·  Private on-device AI}

Landing page  ·  Features  ·  Build it yourself  ·  How it works

Open a folder  →  Write in styled text  →  It saves as plain Markdown  →  Open it anywhere

Features

Styled while you write, plain text underneath

What you see is styled: headings, bold, links, tables, checkboxes, and you edit them as they look. Prefer to see the Markdown symbols of the line you're editing? Turn on Show Markdown while editing in the Styled menu in the title bar. There is no import or export step. The file on disk is ordinary Markdown that works in GitHub, Obsidian, VS Code or any text editor, today and in twenty years.

Press / for anything

Type / at the start of a line to insert headings, lists, to-dos, quotes, tables, code, maths, diagrams, callouts, links, images or today's date. Keep typing to filter. Select text and a formatting toolbar appears; paste from a web page or Google Docs and it arrives as clean Markdown.

Rich documents, from plain text

Everything renders right in the editor:

	Written as	Shows as
Callouts	> [!TIP], > [!WARNING] … (GitHub's syntax)	Coloured note, tip, important, warning and caution boxes
Diagrams	```mermaid	Flowcharts, sequence, state, Gantt, pie, timeline, journey and git diagrams
Maths	$…$ and $$…$$	Typeset with KaTeX
Code	```ts	Highlighted for over a hundred languages, with a copy button
Tables	| a | b |	Real tables you type straight into. Tab and the arrow keys move between cells, and the columns stay tidy
Properties	--- front matter	A tidy card at the top of the note
And more		Footnotes, ==highlights==, task lists, images, links between headings

Write, Split or Read

Switch from the title bar or with ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3. Write is the live editor, Split puts the finished page next to it and follows your cursor, and Read is the clean page on its own.

Writing intelligence that stays on your computer

Select a sentence and press ⌘J to improve it, fix its spelling and grammar, make it shorter or longer, change its tone or translate it. With nothing selected, AmberText can continue your draft, suggest titles, pull out action items or review the whole document. You see every change before it goes into your text.

It runs on a small open model on your own computer: private, offline and free. Pick a size the first time:

	Model	Good for
Compact	Qwen3.5 0.8B	Quick fixes. Runs on almost anything
Standard	Qwen3.5 2B	The best balance: rewrites, tone, translation, summaries. 8 GB memory or more
Enhanced	Qwen3.5 4B	The most capable. 16 GB memory recommended

Already run Ollama or LM Studio? Point AmberText at it instead. You can also turn AI off completely.

Focus when you need it

Focus mode (⌘⇧F) softly fades everything except the paragraph you're writing. Typewriter scrolling keeps your line in the middle of the screen, Zen mode hides everything but the page, and a word goal fills up in the status bar as you go.

Everything from the keyboard. ⌘K opens every command, ⌘P jumps to any file, and there is a heading search too.	Outline. Every heading in the note, in the sidebar. Click one to jump there.
Make it yours. Light, dark or match the system, seven accent colours, three typefaces (serif, sans, mono), and your own text size, line height and line width. Changes apply instantly.	Fits the system. Follows light and dark mode, with a translucent sidebar on Mac and Windows.

And the rest

• Folders and tabs: open a folder of notes, create and rename files in the sidebar, and keep several notes open as tabs. Tabs that don't fit wait in a +N menu, so every title stays readable.
• Find and replace across the note, with match case, whole words and regular expressions.
• Export as HTML or PDF, or copy as rich text to paste into email, Docs or Slack.
• Images: paste, drop or insert them with /image and they're copied into an assets folder next to your note. They come along when you save the note somewhere else, and HTML exports carry them inside the file.
• Saves as you go, and notices when a file was changed by another app.

Build it yourself

Note

AmberText isn't publicly released yet, so there are no installers to download. For now you can build it from this repository.

You need a recent Node.js, Rust, and Tauri's system prerequisites for your platform.

git clone https://github.com/Xtendr/AmberText.git
cd AmberText
npm install

	Command	What you get
Run while developing	npm run app:dev	The desktop app, reloading as you change the code
Build the app	npm run app:build	Mac: AmberText.app and a .dmg. Windows: an installer. Both in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/
Browser only	npm run dev	The interface at http://localhost:1420, with demo notes kept in memory

How it works

AmberText is a Tauri 2 desktop app: a small Rust core for files and windows, with the interface in web technology. That keeps the app small (about 10 MB) and fast to start.

• Editor: CodeMirror 6 with a live-preview layer that keeps Markdown syntax hidden while you edit (or shows it around the cursor, if you prefer) and draws tables, diagrams, maths, images and properties as widgets. Tables are edited cell by cell.
• Rendering: markdown-it with footnotes, highlights, KaTeX, Mermaid and highlight.js. Output is sanitised with DOMPurify.
• Interface: React and zustand, with Inter, Newsreader and JetBrains Mono.
• AI: downloads a pinned llama.cpp server and a Qwen3.5 model the first time you ask, checks them against known SHA-256 hashes, and runs them locally. Nothing you write is sent anywhere.

src/            interface (React, TypeScript)
  editor/       CodeMirror setup, live preview, slash menu, AI inline
  components/   title bar, sidebar, preview, settings, command palette
  lib/          Markdown rendering, export, file system bridge
  ai/           model list, AI actions and sessions
src-tauri/      Rust core: files, windows, the local AI runtime, app icons
docs/readme/    the images in this README

License

AmberText is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0. You may use, study, share and change it. If you share a changed version, it must be under the same licence, with its source.

The name AmberText and the feather logo are not covered by the licence. If you publish your own version, please give it a different name and logo.

_{Made by Nicolai Brøndum Knudsen.}