PounceApps
PouncePad icon

PouncePad

A simple, fast, native macOS text editor — a TextEdit/Notepad replacement with real syntax highlighting, live Markdown & Mermaid preview, crash-safe tabs, and a Claude Code channel built right in.

Install with Homebrew See the channel
brew install --cask pounceapps/tap/pouncepad
PouncePad editing Markdown with a live rendered Mermaid diagram
Left: the editor with syntax highlighting. Right: live Markdown preview — including a fully rendered Mermaid diagram.

Features

Everything you want in a scratch editor — nothing you don't.

~30 languages

CodeMirror 6 highlighting for Go, Python, JS/TS, Rust, SQL, JSON, YAML, HTML and more — themed to the editor palette.

Markdown + Mermaid

A live preview pane renders Markdown and Mermaid diagrams as you type; plain text stays plain.

Crash-safe tabs

Every keystroke is saved to disk — unsaved scratch buffers come back after a restart. Clearing history never deletes files.

CLI & Finder

pouncepad file.md from the terminal, or set it as the default editor for .md/.json/.txt/… in Finder’s Open With.

A dozen themes

Rider, One Dark, Dracula, Nord, Solarized, GitHub, Monokai, Ayu and more — light and dark.

Claude channel

A built-in MCP channel: type a question and Claude Code answers inside the app — and can edit your files.

A closer look

Syntax highlighting, themes, and a settings app that feels native.

PouncePad syntax highlighting
Multi-language syntax highlighting, following your theme.
PouncePad theme picker
A full theme gallery — the whole app recolors instantly.
PouncePad about screen
Native full-screen settings, with an About that shows what’s inside.
PouncePad MCP / Claude setup
Two-command setup to connect Claude Code, with a live connection status.

The Claude channel

Type in the app. Claude answers — and edits — right there.

PouncePad has no built-in LLM. Instead it opens a channel to Claude Code running in your terminal: your message is pushed to Claude (no polling), Claude replies in the chat panel, and it can read and rewrite the file you’re working on through the app’s MCP tools.

Claude replying in the PouncePad chat panel
Claude answering in the chat panel — Markdown, code blocks and all.
describe this code
topcats.go ranks cats by remaining lives — a Cat struct, a topCats() sort, and a main that prints a ranked list. Want me to add a tags column?
yes
Done — edited topcats.go live (the tab’s now unsaved •): added the strings import and a [tags] column. That’s the channel driving the editor, not just chatting. 🐾

Install

One line, notarized, updates via brew.

macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon).

brew tap pounceapps/tap
brew install --cask pouncepad

Or download a notarized .dmg from pounceapps/downloads. To wire up the Claude channel, see Settings → MCP / Claude in the app, or the wiki.