FoldingText is a plain-text editor for macOS that layers structured outlining and focus modes directly on top of Markdown, letting you write, organise, and narrow your view without ever leaving a plain .txt file.
What is FoldingText?
FoldingText is a macOS plain-text editor built around the idea that Markdown headings and list hierarchies are already an outline — so why not let you fold, focus, and filter them that way? Unlike traditional Markdown editors that treat your document as a static preview surface, FoldingText treats every heading and list item as a live node you can collapse, hide, or tag with modes like @todo or @timer. The result sits somewhere between a distraction-free writing tool and a lightweight task manager, all stored in files your future self can open in any text editor on Earth.
What does FoldingText do best?
FoldingText's signature trick is structural folding: click the triangle beside any heading or nested list and the entire subtree vanishes from view — no sidebar, no pane switching, just your document tightening around what matters right now. I use this constantly when a research note balloons to 4 000 words; folding every section except the one I'm editing makes it feel like a clean page again.
Beyond folding, the Focus Mode greys out everything outside the active node, and the tagging system (@todo, @done, @priority) turns a bullet list into a filtered task view with a single keyboard shortcut. There's also a built-in @timer mode that counts down inline — genuinely useful for Pomodoro sessions without leaving the document.
- Fold any heading or list subtree with one click
- Mode-aware filtering: surface only @todo or @done lines across the whole file
- Inline countdown timers via the @timer tag
- Plain .txt storage — no proprietary format, no lock-in
- Scriptable via a JavaScript plugin API
How much does FoldingText cost?
FoldingText is a one-time paid purchase from the developer's website — no subscription, no in-app purchases. There is a free trial period so you can put the folding and focus modes through their paces before committing. It is not available on the Mac App Store, so updates come directly from the developer site.
Who should use FoldingText?
FoldingText earns its place for writers and developers who live in plain text and want outliner-style structure without abandoning Markdown syntax. If you already keep notes in .md files and find yourself manually scrolling past irrelevant sections, FoldingText's fold-and-focus workflow will feel immediately natural. It is also a solid lightweight project-management layer for solo developers — the tag-and-filter system is nowhere near as heavy as OmniFocus, but it's far more frictionless than keeping a separate Todoist project synced to your notes.
It is not the right fit if you want a rich WYSIWYG editor, collaborative editing, or deep iOS sync. For pure distraction-free prose, iA Writer or Ulysses offer a more polished experience; for full outlining power, OmniOutliner is in a different league. FoldingText lives happily in the middle: structurally smart, stubbornly plain-text.
What are the best FoldingText alternatives?
The closest spiritual relative is Bike Outliner — also macOS-only, also plain-text-first, but built explicitly as an outliner rather than a Markdown editor. iA Writer and Typora offer cleaner Markdown preview modes but no folding or task filtering. Obsidian covers the note-graph angle with a folding plugin, though it's considerably heavier. For task-focused outlining, OmniOutliner is the power-user choice, but it locks you into a proprietary format. If you want folding inside a full IDE, VS Code with the Fold All Regions shortcut gets you partway there — but you lose the live mode-filtering that makes FoldingText genuinely novel.
How does FoldingText compare to Bike Outliner?
Both tools fold plain-text hierarchies on macOS, but they solve slightly different problems. Bike Outliner is purpose-built for deep tree manipulation — moving, indenting, and restructuring nodes at speed — and its native file format (OPML-adjacent BIKE XML) is richer than plain Markdown. FoldingText stays closer to standard Markdown, which means your files remain readable everywhere, but its outlining operations are less fluid for heavy restructuring sessions. I reach for FoldingText when the document will also be published or shared; I'd reach for Bike when the structure itself is the deliverable.
