Platforms

Slate on macOS feels like any other Mac app. The traffic lights sit in the top-left, the menu bar lives at the top of the screen, and the title bar blends into the window chrome rather than standing apart.

Menus

macOS keeps a small native menu bar so the standard system items keep working. It has three menus:

• Slate. Services, Hide, Hide Others, Show All, Quit.
• Edit. Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All.
• Window. Minimize, Close.

Everything specific to Slate lives in the window chrome rather than the menu bar. The Slate logo at the top of the sidebar opens the app menu (About Slate, Acknowledgements, Settings, Check for Updates, Quit). The Help button opens this help site to whichever topic you pick. The header also has buttons for a new document, the command palette, and settings. For everything else, such as opening and saving, switching views, and toggling the sidebar and outline, use the command palette or its keyboard shortcuts.

File associations

Slate registers itself for Markdown and plain text along with common code and config formats, including .json, .yaml, .toml, .js, .ts, .py, and .css. Right-click a file in Finder and choose Open With to send it to Slate.

Conventions

Cmd is the primary modifier in shortcuts. Cmd + comma opens Settings. The About box uses Slate's in-app dialog rather than the native panel, so the credits format matches the rest of the app.

Slate on Windows uses the standard window controls in the top-right and a title bar that blends into the window. It does not add a traditional menu bar.

Menus

There is no menu bar. The Slate logo at the top of the sidebar opens the app menu (About Slate, Acknowledgements, Settings, Check for Updates, Quit), and the Help button opens this help site. Everything else lives in the command palette and its keyboard shortcuts: new and open, saving, switching views, toggling the sidebar and outline, and so on. Standard editing shortcuts (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and the rest) work wherever text is editable.

File associations

The installer registers Slate for Markdown and plain text plus common code and config formats such as .json, .yaml, .toml, .js, .ts, .py, and .css. Right-click a file in Explorer and choose Open With.

Conventions

Ctrl is the primary modifier in shortcuts. Drag and drop from Explorer works as expected; dropping a folder onto the window opens it as a new workspace root.

Slate on Linux uses the same window chrome as the other desktops and does not add a menu bar of its own.

Menus

As on Windows, there is no menu bar. The Slate logo at the top of the sidebar opens the app menu (About Slate, Acknowledgements, Settings, Check for Updates, Quit), the Help button opens this help site, and the command palette drives the rest.

File associations

The desktop entry registers Slate for Markdown and plain text along with common code and config formats such as .json, .yaml, .toml, .js, .ts, .py, and .css. Use Open With from your file manager's context menu.

Conventions

Ctrl is the primary modifier. Drag and drop works the same as on the other desktops. If your distribution uses a Wayland session, the native file picker is whatever your portal provides.

iOS Coming soon

Slate for iPad and iPhone is on the roadmap. The plan is a single-pane layout that swipes between views, with the sidebar as a slide-out panel. External keyboard shortcuts will match the desktop set so muscle memory carries over.

We are not yet shipping iOS builds. Follow updates from the homepage if you want to be notified when they appear in the App Store.

Web Coming soon

A hosted web build of Slate is planned. It will run in the browser, use the File System Access API for opening and saving local files, and store working state in IndexedDB so a refresh does not lose your edits.

The web build will not have everything the desktop has:

• No command-line argument for opening files.
• No system-wide file associations; opening .md files from the desktop will still launch the native app where available.
• The native file watcher is replaced by browser file handles, which have slightly different conflict behavior.

See external changes for how Slate handles conflicts in general.

On desktop, Slate runs as a single instance. Opening Slate again while it is already running forwards your request to the existing window: any file you passed becomes a new tab in the current session, rather than starting a second copy of the app.