Space

Editing in Space

macOS 12.0+

Quick Look. Reimagined for Editing

Native Quick Look

In Space

Small Text. No Colors

No Zoom or Editing

Pinch

Syntax Highlighting Free Plugin

Edit

Code Folding Free Plugin

On Glass

Markdown, written beautifully

Free Plugin

Type / for Any Block

CSV Table

KaTeX with Autocomplete

Mermaid Diagrams

Code Block

Outline

Syntax: 100+ grammars, by tree-sitter

Free Plugin

And Vim, the beloved editing experience

And every symbol, one click away

40 themes What’s your favorite one?

Free PluginFree Plugin

State-of-the-Art Text Rendering The Slug Algorithm

  1. Trace the Outline

  2. Cut into Bands

  3. Cast Rays

  4. Apply Font Smoothing

  5. Anti-Alias the Edges

  6. Vibrant on the Glass

Blazing fast by nature Up to 8x faster than native

Zoom: the time to draw one frame. Lower is faster.
SceneDisplayNativeSpaceFaster
Editor1×5.23 ms0.66 ms7.9 times faster
Editor2×7.16 ms0.85 ms8.4 times faster
First-frame latency: the time to draw one frame. Lower is faster.
SceneDisplayNativeSpaceFaster
App UI1×5.28 ms0.84 ms6.3 times faster
App UI2×7.45 ms0.95 ms7.9 times faster
Editor1×9.58 ms1.92 ms5.0 times faster
Editor2×12.88 ms1.98 ms6.5 times faster
Dense document1×100.23 ms38.03 ms2.6 times faster
Dense document2×110.89 ms37.83 ms2.9 times faster
How We Measured

Lightning-fast Editing SIMD Optimized

The text of a file is kept in a rope, a tree of chunks. An edit changes one chunk and the path above it.

Rope insert at the cursor, by the size of the file
FileTime
1 KB64 ns
1 MB133 ns
100 MB178 ns
1 GB211 ns

Counting the characters of a 1 KB chunk: Byte by byte, 141 ns; 16 bytes at a time, 12 ns.

How We Measured

Lift off into Space

Press Space. Edit. Done

More Plugins Coming Soon

  • Helix
  • Git
  • PDF
  • Document

Credits

Space uses hundreds of open-source libraries and wouldn’t be possible without them.

Notices

Slug. Space draws text with the Slug algorithm, from Eric Lengyel, “GPU-Centered Font Rendering Directly from Glyph Outlines”, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 31–47, 2017. © 2017 Eric Lengyel, licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0. The home page crops four of the paper’s pages; the whole pages are 31, 34, 37 and 39.

hb-gpu. Space’s shader comes from hb-gpu, part of HarfBuzz, by Behdad Esfahbod. Chord Ink changed it in its fork of the GPUI framework.

Inter. The word “Space” in the “how it works” steps is drawn from the outlines of Inter Display SemiBold 4.1. Inter © The Inter Project Authors (github.com/rsms/inter), SIL Open Font License 1.1: full text.

Math. The formulas in the Markdown demo are laid out by RaTeX (© erweixin, MIT License) and drawn from the outlines of the KaTeX fonts, © 2009–2010 Design Science, Inc. and © 2014–2018 Khan Academy, SIL Open Font License 1.1: full text.

Themes. The editor themes use colors from these projects. Under the LGPL 2.1 or later: Adwaita (by Christian Hergert / GNOME, © 2020 Christian Hergert). Under the MIT License: Ayu (© 2016 Ike Ku), Catppuccin (© 2021 Catppuccin), CutiePro (© 2026 Wuemeli), Dracula (by Ben Hamment, © 2023 Dracula Theme), Everforest (© 2025 Albert Skonieczny, © 2019 sainnhe), GitHub (© 2025 Pyae Sone Aung), Gruvbox (by morhetz), Melange (© 2024 adorabilis), Monosami (© 2024-2026 Samuel Onoja, Fabian Bergström), Night Owl (by Auguste Bercovici, © 2018 Sarah Drasner), Nightfox (by cange, © 2024 Christian Angermann), One (by Atom/GitHub, © 2014 GitHub Inc.), Rosé Pine (by Kainoa Kanter, © Rosé Pine), Tokyo Night (by enkia, © 2024 Austin Saunders), VS Code Dark Modern (by kcamcam, © 2024 Kevin Camellini). Under the Apache License 2.0: JetBrains (by Artem Evsevev, © JetBrains s.r.o.). The Xcode Default and Visual Studio themes use the colors of those apps, by Apple and Microsoft. The MIT License text, with the copyright line of every project under it, is here.

Logos. The logos and icons on this page belong to their owners, who are not connected with Space and do not endorse it, and many are trademarks. Most come from Devicon (MIT License), the rest from Simple Icons (CC0 1.0), vscode-icons (MIT License), Material Icon Theme (MIT License) and file-icons (ISC License) or are the owners’ own files. Every file is a changed copy, simplified for the web. The Bash logo, © 2016 Free Software Foundation, designed by ProspectOne with art director Justin Dorfman for Chet Ramey. Under Free Art License 1.3. The Git logo, by Jason Long. Under CC BY 3.0. The Go gopher, designed by Renée French. Under CC BY 4.0. The HTML5 logo, by W3C. Under CC BY 3.0. The NixOS logo, by the NixOS project. Under CC BY 4.0. The PHP logo, by Colin Viebrock. Under CC BY-SA 4.0. The R logo, by The R Foundation. Under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Ruby logo, by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Under CC BY-SA 2.5. The Solidity logo, by the Solidity team. Under CC BY 4.0. The Zig logo, by the Zig Software Foundation. Under CC BY-SA 4.0. The Helix logo, by jakenvac for the Helix project. Under MPL 2.0. The changed copies of the logos under CC BY-SA, the Free Art License and MPL 2.0 are under those same licenses. The MIT and ISC license texts, with the copyright line of every project under them, are here.

No endorsement. Eric Lengyel, Terathon Software, the HarfBuzz, Inter, KaTeX and RaTeX projects and the authors of the themes are not connected with Space and do not endorse it.