ScratchPadIt

ScratchPadIt is a plain text note taking app for Mac built for speed and simplicity. A sidebar holds all your pages, so you can switch between notes instantly, add one in a click, and delete it when you are done. No inbox to manage, no tagging system, nothing to file before you can start writing.

A page is named after its first line, so nothing asks you for a title first. When that is not a useful name, you can name a page by hand, or clear the name to go back. Pages can be collected into groups and collapsed when the list gets long.

Paste from a website, document or email and the hidden formatting is stripped on arrival. No surprise fonts, no bold carrying over, no invisible styling.

It also reveals hidden Unicode characters. Zero width spaces, non breaking spaces and soft hyphens sneak in when copying from the web, and they can silently break code, terminal commands and API calls. ScratchPadIt marks them so you can find them before they cause a problem.

Point it at any text file anywhere on your Mac and read it, edit it, and save straight back to disk. The file stays where you put it, in the format it already had, still readable by everything else.

Files are coloured as you read them. Stylesheets, scripts, JSON, XML, HTML and property lists get their strings, numbers, comments, tags, attributes and web addresses picked out, with no project to create and no language to choose. Long files fold.

To be clear about what this is not: ScratchPadIt is not a code editor or an IDE, and it is not trying to become one. No autocomplete, no compiler, no debugger. The colouring is there so a config file you opened to read makes sense at a glance. If you want to write an app, use Xcode. If you want to open the file it was complaining about, fix a value and move on, that is what this is for.

Open a markdown file and the rendered page sits beside the text as you type. Nothing is converted, and the bytes on disk stay the markdown you wrote.

Put a table inside a page, with merged cells and as many lines in a cell as it needs. Put up to three documents side by side, each scrolling on its own.

Find and replace with regular expressions across every page at once. Format and minify JSON, encode and decode Base64 and URLs, trim and deduplicate lines. Click a line number to copy that whole line.

Word wrap, line numbers, delete protection and invisible characters toggle per page. Your font and colours are set once and apply everywhere.