A quiet, distraction-free text editor for macOS.

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:

brew install --cask pwittchen/tap/kayet

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.

hiding even the traffic lights is a bold move, i like it. controls fading in from the top edge sounds way better than another settings toggle

@gevorgarakelyann Thanks for the feedback!