Launched this week
kayet
the minimalistic text editor for macOS
59 followers
the minimalistic text editor for macOS
59 followers
A quiet, distraction-free text editor for macOS.
Free
Launch Team / Built With
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Promoted
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
I'm Piotr, and I built kayet because every editor I tried kept showing me things: toolbars, sidebars, tabs, status bars, badges. I wanted the opposite: open the app, see only my text, and start writing.
How it works
By default kayet hides everything except your text, 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. The file tree and Markdown preview are there when you need them (⌘\, ⌘⇧P) and gone when you don't.
What's inside
✍️ Markdown done quietly: subtle syntax styling, a live side-by-side preview with scroll sync, lists that continue themselves, ⌘B / ⌘I, paste a URL over text to make a link, paste an image to save it next to your file
🧘 Zen mode: keeps the cursor line centered and dims everything except the current paragraph
🎤 Presentation mode: separate slides with `---` and present any Markdown file, with step-by-step reveal
📤 Export to a self-contained HTML page or a PDF
⌘ Keyboard-first: command palette (⌘K), fuzzy file finder (⌘P) and workspace-wide search (⌘⇧F)
🗂 Workspaces and tabs: point kayet at any folder, or open one from the terminal with `kayet .`
💻 Code editor mode with line numbers and syntax highlighting for code and config files
🎨 17 bundled themes (Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Rosé Pine, Tokyo Night, Solarized…) that follow macOS light/dark automatically, or your own in a small TOML file
🛟 Safe by default: crash recovery for unsaved changes, detection of files changed on disk, and an optional autosave
Built to be light
kayet is written in Rust (Tauri 2) with CodeMirror 6 and no heavy frontend framework. It opens in about a third of a second, and a benchmark script checks that it stays fast. It 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.
Free and open source (Apache 2.0).
Download at: https://getkayet.app
or install it via Homebrew:
I'd love to hear what you think.
What does your ideal writing setup look like, and what would make kayet fit into it? 🙏
I like very much the concept and execution. I will use it for some days but those are my first questions and perceptions:
- Is this Markdown only? If I want to save it in another format?
- Wrap indent. I use a lot lists and nested lists specially in those kind of text. The markdown works well but the original text doesn't?Is it possible with Kayet?
- It seems free? What is the revenue model?
- It would be nice to know your story. Why did you decide to do this project. What were your first difficulties. Where are you from. What is your background... In small personal projects the person and the human side is important. I would include that on the site.
- I love Mac and minimal, beautiful design like this.
@narcismirandes Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback! Really appreciate it!
Kayet isn't Markdown-only. You can edit plain text, config files, scripts, source code (with optional syntax highlighting), and pretty much anything text-based.
As for wrapped indentation, not yet. Currently, wrapped lines don't align with the text in list items. The preview handles this correctly, but the source editor doesn't. It's a great suggestion!
Edit: Wrapped indentation was fixed in v. 0.15.3. You can update kayet to the latest version and it should work correctly now :-).
Regarding pricing, Kayet is completely free and open source. I actually considered making it a paid app, but the text editor market is incredibly crowded, and people tend to stick with their favorite tools. As a relatively unknown indie developer, I wasn't sure I could compete. So I decided to release it for free instead.
To be completely transparent, Kayet is also a bit of an experiment for me — a chance to learn how Product Hunt works, practice marketing, and build some reputation before launching my other projects, including paid macOS apps and SaaS products. If Kayet gains traction, I might eventually introduce optional paid features, like cloud storage and sync. But we'll see!
A bit about me: I'm a software engineer from Poland with over 12 years of experience, mostly in backend and mobile development. Lately, I've been getting into indie development and building my own apps.
The story behind Kayet is pretty simple. I wanted a clean, minimalist text editor for my Mac, but nothing quite matched what I had in mind. So I built my own! It's heavily inspired by iA Writer, which I really like, but with a slightly different approach to design and workflow.
And you're absolutely right about the human side of indie projects. Sharing more of my story on the website is a great idea. I'll definitely consider it!
Thanks again for giving Kayet a try and taking the time to share your thoughts. It really means a lot!
@piotr_wittchen With the update the wrapped indentation works very well. Nice improvement!
@narcismirandes Great!
This is right up my alley — I love that everything hides by default and only the text is left. Zen mode dimming everything except the current paragraph is a really nice touch, and being able to present straight from a Markdown file with --- is clever. Going to try it for my next round of writing.
@jcbuilds Thanks! Glad you like it! Let me know what you think once you've had a chance to try it out 🙂