A quiet place to write.

Glassine is a Markdown writing app for the Mac: a sheet of glass, a caret that glides, and plain text files that stay yours.

Get it on the Mac App Store or download the .dmg

Free and open source. macOS 14 or later. Version 0.2.29.

The editor with the sidebar open: an essay on a sheet of dark glass, the paragraph being written lit and the rest stepped back

Review in the Book style, dark: the essay set as a finished page, over the Graphite backdrop

All Documents, the library as a wall of cards with live previews, over a warm backdrop

Timelapse over the Moss backdrop: today's note in front, earlier days receding behind it

Settings, Behind the glass: tiles of the backdrops with Aurora chosen, its folds of colour showing through the card

One page, start to finish.Written, read, relit, put away, and found again the next day — one minute. Sound is one click.

Write.

The caret glides from word to word instead of jumping. The paragraph you are in stays lit and in the middle of the window; the rest steps back. Markdown's marks dim — or leave the page altogether, until you return to the sentence they belong to.

Read it as a page.

⌘↩ sets the document as a finished page in one of six styles — this is Book, after dark — then puts you back where you were. ⌘⇧↩ keeps that page beside the text, redrawn as you write.

A library, not a file picker.

Every document is a plain .md file, named from its first line and saved as you type — in iCloud Drive, in any folder you choose, or in a private GitHub repository of yours that keeps every version. All Documents lays them out as a wall of pages; a click grows one into the window.

Yesterday is still there.

Timelapse keeps today's note in front and the earlier days receding behind it. Scroll to walk back through them.

Change the light behind the glass.

The window is a blur of whatever is behind it. Or put the colour inside: long, slowly drifting folds of it, like silk lit from one side. Ten come built in, and any of them can be recoloured into one of yours.

This page is lit by the same shader. Try one.

And the rest.

Fewer features than most writing apps, and fewer interruptions. Everything is on one screen or one key away.

Formatting as you goSelect words and a bar appears over them. / at the start of a line opens a menu of the same; keep typing to filter.
Tasks that behaveClick a box; the strike sweeps across; a moment later the item settles below the unfinished ones.
Dates and chips@today becomes the date, drawn as a capsule and kept as text. ⌘⇧H puts any word in one: ==this== in the file.
A caret of your ownSpeed, blink, width, and eight shapes. Left alone a few seconds it does a trick — a hop, a bounce, a flip. Off under Reduce Motion.
ThemesNine built in, dark by default and a few light ones. Make your own with a live preview; import and export them as files.
Settings that show youA card over the page, so every change is visible behind it. Search finds any setting by name; ⌘Z takes a change back.
One key away⌘K is a command bar for everything, and ⌘/ shows every shortcut on one sheet.
Open With, and float on topFinder opens .md and .txt files in Glassine, edited where they are. ⌘. keeps the window over everything else.
Nothing sent anywhereNo accounts, no analytics, no servers. The privacy page is one paragraph.

What's new

Version 0.2.29 — October 19, 2026. The changelog has every line, by day.

Tables are tables. A pipe table is drawn as a grid now — a border, a line under every row and at every column, the header on a faint fill — never wider than the page, with a long cell wrapping under its own column. /table 3x4 starts one at any size. Tables.
Smart dashes keep off the separator. Type | --- | --- | and the hyphens stay hyphens; a separator that arrived as | — | — | reads as a table anyway, and a paste straightens it.
A paste knows a table of tabs. A spreadsheet selection becomes a pipe table; a paste of several lines lands on lines of its own; text dragged in from another app is read like a paste. And a pasted heading keeps its room above with the syntax hidden, which it used to lose until the caret visited it.
Closing pages. ⌥⌘W closes every page but this one, ⌥⇧⌘W all of them; the fanned cards have a × and the footer's pips a right-click menu. Pages.
A quieter icon. The Dock icon is the app's own glass again, now in the look it comes with: Midnight over Soft Sky, the g in paper-white on it.

Free, and yours to keep.

Open source under the MIT licence. Requires macOS 14 or later.

Get it on the Mac App Store or download the .dmg

Mac App Store

It is Glassine Writer there — the plain name was already taken; the app itself is Glassine everywhere. Updates come through the store.

Direct download

Glassine.dmg, notarized; drag it to Applications. It checks for a new version once a day and installs it itself. Every version is under Releases.

From source

Xcode's tools, three lines, a minute.

git clone https://github.com/a-libre/glassine
cd glassine
./build.sh --install

The manual covers every feature, key and setting. For a bug or a question, open an issue; Help → Copy Debug Info puts everything useful on your clipboard.