Fastra: Native macOS text editor

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Fastra is a native macOS text editor for safe, visually verifiable search and replace: easy with *, powerful with regex.

The * syntax bridges the gap between everyday search-and-replace tasks and complex regular expressions: it captures text without regex syntax, while the live preview shows every change before Fastra writes anything.

That bridge gives Fastra its name: facillime ad astra, "with greatest ease to the stars". The asterisk (*) is the star.

Download / Releases

Ready-made builds are available as DMGs on the releases page: download the DMG, open it, and drag Fastra into your Applications folder. The DMG is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper opens it without warnings. Fastra must first be installed from a DMG; signed in-app updates are available from version 1.19.1 onward under Fastra → Check for Updates…. Requires macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon).

The * wildcard: Power without the syntax

Everyday restructuring tasks are impossible in a plain text editor and overkill in regex. Fastra's answer is the asterisk: one * captures any text, and in the replace field you simply reuse it.

Turn ring, The into The ring across a whole list: Search *, The, replace The *. Done. No regex, no manual, no risk: The live preview shows every change before you apply it.

• Each * becomes a numbered, draggable capture pill. Reorder text by dragging pills into the replace field.
• ** captures across line breaks (grab whole blocks between two markers).
• This is something an ordinary text editor cannot do at all, and doing it with regular expressions requires syntax most people have to look up every time. With Fastra it is a single keystroke.

And when a task really needs the full power, switch on RegEx mode and get token highlighting, curated patterns, and guided capture groups.

Features

• Preview before apply: Side-by-side before/after for every operation; nothing is written until you confirm.
• * wildcard search with capture semantics, no regex knowledge needed.
• Full RegEx mode with colored token highlighting and a curated pattern library.
• Drag & drop capture groups from the find field into the replace field.
• Scopes: Current file, all open tabs, folders, or a configured file set in the current project.
• Projects and Git: A live file tree, separate staged and unstaged changes, a native multi-lane commit graph, and rich diffs without leaving the editor.
• 4D project support: Familiar .4dm coloring, completion with signatures, checks, and Option-double-click navigation to methods and classes.
• Markdown: Local live preview, formatting tools, images, formulas and Mermaid diagrams alongside the source.
• Compare files side by side: Choose any two saved files or open tabs, or compare an edited tab with its version on disk. Shift-clicking a companion tab preselects both documents for the quick path.
• Column selection under Soft Wrap stays on logical text lines; column copy/paste, typing, deletion, transformations, and Paste Column are each undoable as one action.
• A visible Home button safely returns the current window to the welcome screen. Unsaved work is confirmed first and then gets its normal save dialogs.
• Light & dark mode, native SwiftUI/AppKit, no Electron.
• Local & private: No accounts, telemetry, document uploads, or subscription. The update check contacts only Fastra's signed GitHub Pages feed and sends no hardware or system profile.

Projects and Git, in the editor

Open a folder and Fastra gives it a live, hierarchical file sidebar with an always-visible file-name filter. Git repositories are recognised automatically, remembered on the welcome screen, and remain ordinary local folders: Fastra is a text editor first, not a replacement for a full Git client.

• The Changes view separates staged and unstaged files. Stage, unstage or discard individual files, inspect their diff, write a commit message and commit from the sidebar. During merge, rebase, cherry-pick and revert conflicts, a compact bar in the normal editor navigates conflict blocks, accepts either or both sides with native Undo, and marks only the verified, saved file version as resolved. Binary files, including text-decodable files that Git classifies as binary through attributes, and partially loaded files get an honest limitation instead of a text-only resolver.
• The Graph view renders branches and merges as a native multi-lane history, with branch and tag labels. Expand a commit to see its files; double-click a commit or file to open its diff in an editor tab. Text patches can use a read-only side-by-side view with aligned lines, intraline emphasis, folds, an overview ruler and keyboard navigation between hunks; binary and combined patches remain available through explicit metadata or the selectable unified fallback.
• The current branch, ahead/behind state and file status are visible in the project sidebar. Fetch can be manual or scheduled while Fastra is active; its age and errors stay visible. Pull always uses a selected strategy (rebase, merge or fast-forward-only), checks the repository again immediately before running, and never hides an automatic stash or push.
• Curated actions cover creating a branch, stash/pop, cherry-pick, revert and continuing or aborting an active Git operation. Destructive or history- changing paths use a fresh preflight and confirmation. Force push is exposed only as an exact force-with-lease operation. Git identity can be configured locally for the repository or, after a separate confirmation, globally.
• Open in Terminal hands the project directory to Terminal.app without constructing or running a shell command inside Fastra.

Git support is a thin, asynchronous front end to the installed git command. If Git is unavailable, these controls stay out of the way; when Git reports an error, Fastra shows its actual message rather than hiding it. Repository operations are coordinated across Fastra windows so conflicting commands do not run over one another.

4D projects as first-class source code

Fastra treats 4D source as more than plain text. .4dm methods use a dedicated, familiar color scheme for commands, keywords, variables, tables and comments. In an open project, Fastra indexes Project/Sources/Methods case-insensitively and highlights project methods separately from process variables.

Especially useful when exploring a larger codebase: Option-double-click a method name to open the corresponding project method, or a class name to open its class file. Function definitions in the current class jump locally. If no target can be found, Fastra opens project search with the name instead of failing silently.

• Completion suggests commands with syntax signatures and constants after two typed characters.
• Validate Document provides local structure checks, validates .4DForm files against their schema, and can optionally use an already installed tool4d for authoritative syntax diagnostics. Fastra neither bundles nor downloads tool4d.
• .4DProject and .4DForm open as JSON; .4DCatalog and .4DSettings as XML. Text-menu transformations can strip token suffixes from canonical 4D exports or add command tokens again.

Markdown that stays local

Markdown files can show an optional live preview on the right, separated from the editor by a persistent splitter. The renderer supports GitHub-flavoured Markdown including tables, task lists, strikethrough, syntax-highlighted code blocks and links. It also displays local images, TeX formulas written as $…$ or $$…$$, and diagrams from fenced mermaid blocks. Selecting and copying from the preview preserves plain text, HTML and rich text where the receiving app supports it.

A source-formatting toolbar plus menu and context-menu commands cover emphasis, headings, lists, quotes, links and tables as normal undoable Markdown edits. Pasting or dropping an image saves or copies it beside the saved document and inserts a relative link, so text and images remain portable together.

Fastra's preview adds one deliberately narrow extension to GFM for visible blank lines: a source line containing only two or more ordinary ASCII spaces renders as exactly one completely empty text line. An empty line or exactly one space keeps its CommonMark meaning. Two spaces at the end of a non-empty line and a trailing backslash remain ordinary hard breaks; the extension does not apply inside code blocks.

Text between pairs of two equals signs, such as ==important==, is rendered with a fixed, appearance-aware marker background. This is a Fastra extension, not standard GFM; it composes with nested Markdown while code stays literal. The Markdown toolbar, menu and context menu can add the marker. A separate Hard Line Break helper inserts exactly two trailing spaces plus an ordinary line break, keeping this otherwise easy-to-forget Markdown notation visible.

Clicking a passage in the preview scrolls the editor to the matching source line and places the cursor there — including inside a long paragraph, where the line is resolved from the line breaks before the click. The column is an approximation, because the rendered text no longer contains the Markdown syntax. Links still open in your browser, and dragging out a selection does not jump.

The preview and all of its rendering libraries stay local. Image paths are resolved relative to the Markdown file; remote images are deliberately not loaded, so opening a file does not quietly contact the network. A link opens only when you choose it.

Smart Paste converts formatted clipboard content from browsers or office apps into clean Markdown at the cursor. It uses the separately installed md-clip command-line tool, and explains how to install it when it is not available.

More than search & replace

The Text menu bundles transformations that otherwise require heavyweight editors. The more advanced ones:

• Case transformations inside the replacement pattern (\U \L \u \l \E): Reshape capitalization while replacing.
• Process lines containing…: Apply a search & replace only to lines matching a filter.
• Process duplicate lines: Detect duplicates and transform or collect them.
• Extract matches: Pull every hit into a new document.
• Zap gremlins: Hunt down invisible and invalid characters.
• Unicode normalization (NFC/NFD), strip diacriticals, straight ⇄ typographic quotes, escape sequences.
• Sort lines explicitly in ascending or descending alphabetical order, join and deduplicate them, hard wrap, add/remove line numbers, exchange words, and format JSON or XML.
• Transform from an example derives a wildcard pattern from before/after text; save, import and export reusable search patterns.
• Large and binary files have guarded views, including a read-only hex view with an explicit edit mode.

Fastra deliberately stays approachable: There are editors with even more machinery, and a matching learning curve to go with it. Fastra covers the everyday cases without a manual.

By default, Fastra reopens the last project windows and saved documents on the next launch. You can turn this off under Settings → Startup. Contents of unsaved or untitled documents are deliberately never stored or restored. If a Finder file-open action launches Fastra, the saved session is restored and the explicitly opened file is added. With session restoration disabled, only the Finder file opens.

XPath navigation for XML

⇧⌘X opens a floating XPath bar for XML-like documents (.xml, .xsd, .xsl, .xslt, .plist, .svg source, .4DCatalog, .4DSettings): typing jumps live to the first match, Enter/arrows step through further matches, and child elements and attributes are suggested from the document. A deliberately compact subset is supported:

• absolute (/root/child) and relative paths (treated like //…),
• // (any depth) and * (any element name),
• predicates [n], [@attr], [@attr='value'],
• targets @attr and text().

Anything else (axes, functions, ..) is reported clearly as unsupported. With broken XML the last valid index stays active; the error appears unobtrusively in the bar.

Views, previews and language detection

• The view switcher in the footer (also in the View menu, ⌃⌘1–3) toggles each file between Text, Preview and Hex — making the hex view reachable for every saved file.
• Images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, WebP) and PDFs open in a read-only preview (large images are downsampled to stay memory-safe); SVG renders by default and can be edited as XML source.
• Unsaved tabs without a file extension detect their language conservatively from content (JSON, XML, HTML, Markdown, CSS, JavaScript, shebang scripts); the format chip in the footer doubles as a manual language switcher whose choice always wins.
• The visible Soft Wrap control next to it stores its on/off state per effective format and synchronizes every open document of that format. Plain text, Markdown, HTML, and XML start wrapped; code and configuration formats start unwrapped with horizontal scrolling. Wrap targets can be the window width, an app-wide page guide, or a fixed column; the guide can be shown independently.
• Option-drag selects a rectangle across logical text lines even while they wrap visually. Edit → Paste Column (⌃⌘V) pastes clipboard lines vertically and pads short target lines to the chosen column.

Syntax highlighting

Tree-sitter-based highlighting for 26 languages and file formats: Bash, C, C++, C#, CSS, Dart, Dockerfile, Go (incl. go.mod), HTML, Java, JavaScript/JSX, JSON, Kotlin, Lua, Markdown, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, SQL, Swift, TOML, TypeScript/TSX and YAML. Everything else opens as plain text.

Requirements & installation

• macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon)
• Download the DMG from Releases, drag Fastra into /Applications, done.
• Starting with 1.19.1, future signed releases are available through Fastra → Check for Updates… and are installed only after confirmation.

Build from source

cd app
./build.sh release   # bundle lands in the project root as Fastra.app
./selftest.sh        # unit tests + in-app self-tests

Details: Build and test · dependency lessons · AGENTS.md (architecture & product principles) · ROADMAP.md · CHANGELOG.md

License

MIT, © 2026 Daniel Müller

Fastra bundles and links third-party software (Sparkle, ripgrep, PCRE2, the CodeEdit and tree-sitter components, cmark-gfm, and the Markdown-preview assets). Their licenses and copyright notices are collected in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.