Kvill

THE PROJECT

Every editor I had open for a quick note was really a project editor wearing a smaller window. Double-clicking a README meant waiting for a workspace to restore and an index to build, for a change that took ten seconds to make. So I wrote the opposite: one file, one window, and nothing to set up first.

I gave myself one rule and let everything follow from it: opening a file should feel like picking up a piece of paper, not like starting a program. No account, no sign-in, no welcome tour, nothing that has to finish before you can type. It never sends anything anywhere, and it never will, because there is nothing it would have to send.

The idea the whole thing hangs on is the margin. Markdown puts its punctuation in your way: the hashes, the dashes and the brackets all sit in the middle of the sentence you are trying to read. Kvill moves them out into the left margin and dims them, so a first-level heading and a sixth-level one finish on the same column and your writing keeps one straight edge.

They come back the moment you put the cursor on that line, exactly as you typed them, and fade again when you leave. It reads like a finished document and edits like plain text, and nothing is ever added to your file to manage the difference. That one decision is most of what makes it feel the way it does.

Speed turned out to be the whole argument rather than a number to brag about. If a file opens the instant you ask for it, you start using the thing for jobs you would otherwise not bother with: a one-line fix to a README, a note you would have left in a chat message, a draft you would have started in the wrong app and never moved. If it takes three seconds, you do none of that. Most of the work went into keeping that true as documents got longer, and almost none of it was where I expected to find it.

Everything else stayed deliberately quiet. Eight colour schemes and a handful of typefaces, because reading for an hour is not the same as reading for a minute. A focus mode that dims everything except the paragraph you are in. A menu on the slash key, so the things worth knowing are one keystroke away instead of memorised. Open a folder and its files line up down the side.

It started as a thing I wanted for myself on a weekend and turned into something I use every day, which is the only review I really trust. Version 1.0 went on sale in August 2026 and is on the Mac App Store now. It is free, with no advertising, no in-app purchases and no paid tier waiting quietly in the wings.

I put the whole thing on GitHub as well. Something that sits between you and your own writing ought to be readable by anyone who wants to check what it does with it, and if you care how any of it works, that is the honest place to look rather than a paragraph here telling you.