Slate

A fast, simple text editor for Windows and Linux (Raspberry Pi included) that opens files of any size: an 800 MB JSON file opens instantly, scrolls smoothly, and can be searched, edited, formatted and saved.

⬇ Download for Windows (one signed Slate.exe, 64-bit Windows 10 or 11) · Linux and Raspberry Pi (apt) · All releases · Website

_{Measured on a Windows PC with an NVMe drive, the file already in Windows' memory cache; the 810 MB file is made-up shop orders.}

• Opens huge files instantly: nothing is loaded up front, only what's on screen is read and drawn. Files open in the background, so a slow network drive never freezes the window.
• Tabs that come back after a restart, including unsaved changes (like Windows 11 Notepad), for big files too (on Linux, up to 64 MB). Work is never lost silently: anything that can't be kept is asked about, and Windows won't shut down over it without asking.
• Find and replace with match case, whole word and regular expressions; fast on huge files (on several cores). Find in selection (Alt+S), Find next and previous through all open tabs (Alt+A), searches kept highlighted in every tab, each in a color of its own (Alt+H), the last searches and replacements with Up and Down, and \n / \t in a regular expression's replacement for a line break or a tab.
• Column selection (Alt+drag, Shift+Alt+arrows: type, paste and delete on every line) and dragging selected text to another place (with Ctrl, a copy).
• Spell check, like Notepad's: words spelled wrong get a wavy red line, in plain text, Markdown's prose and comments in code (not names, links, numbers or data files); right-click one for suggestions, Add to dictionary or Ignore. It's Windows' own spell checker, in Windows' language (on Linux, Enchant, which Slate's package brings along when it can). View → Spell check turns it off.
• Input methods for Chinese, Japanese and Korean: what's being composed shows right in the text at the cursor, in the theme's colors, its clauses underlined.
• Show only the lines that match a search (or the ones that don't, or any of the highlighted ones), in a tab of their own with each line's number in the file; Enter or a double-click goes to that line in the file, and it follows a log as it grows. 809,820 lines out of a 400 MB log in 0.23 s.
• Bookmarks (Ctrl+F2, then F2 / Shift+F2 to go from one to the next), kept with the tabs; read-only tabs (File → Read only; a file you can't write opens that way).
• Syntax colors for 52 kinds of files: Python, PowerShell, Batch, Shell, VBScript/VBA, AutoHotkey, Perl, R, C, C++, C#, Objective-C and Objective-C++, Java, Kotlin, Scala, Swift, Dart, Go, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Ruby, Lua, SQL, HTML (with its CSS and scripts), CSS, XML, Markdown (code blocks in their language), YAML, JSON, TOML, INI, Java properties, nginx and Apache configuration, Terraform/HCL, CMake, Dockerfiles, Inno Setup and NSIS installer scripts, G-code (3D printers, CNC), PPCL programs (Siemens APOGEE and Desigo), CSV with commas or semicolons and TSV (each column its own color), logs, diffs, subtitles (SRT, WebVTT), calendars and contacts (iCalendar, vCard) and Visual Studio solutions. Block comments and multi-line strings are followed correctly.
• Line tools: sort lines (file2 before file10), remove duplicate or blank lines, trim spaces at line ends; UPPERCASE / lowercase / Title Case; comment or uncomment lines with Ctrl+/; duplicate, delete and move lines.
• Format → Convert: Base64, URL encoding and JSON string escapes, each way, on the selection (or the whole text); and the SHA-256 of the selection or the file, to copy.
• EditorConfig: a project's .editorconfig sets the indentation of its files, the line endings and encoding of new ones, and a line break at the end when they're saved.
• CSV and TSV: check (every row as many fields as the first, quotes where they may be, with the line and column of a mistake; a 300 MB file in about 0.2 s), sort the rows by the caret's column (numbers and dates by value, the header row staying on top, rows with line breaks in quotes kept whole), and the column's name in the status bar.
• JSON and XML: format (pretty-print), minify and check, also for JSON Lines; a path bar showing where the caret is (data › [1203] › name, catalog › book[3] › title; copy it as a JSON path or XPath), a structure panel to browse objects, arrays and elements, fast on huge files, and Go to line takes a path too (data[1203].name, /catalog/book[3]/title).
• Print (Ctrl+P): the file or the selection, in its colors (or black), with line numbers and the file's name and page numbers (each can be left out); long lines go on in the next row, breaking between words. Print preview shows the pages as they'll print, and Page setup the paper and margins. Microsoft Print to PDF (Windows) and Print to File (Linux) make a PDF.
• Characters you can't see are shown: control characters as symbols (␀, ␛…), zero-width ones and a byte order mark inside the text as ▯, the bidirectional controls of the "Trojan Source" trick as ⇄ (they don't reorder the text on screen); Show whitespace marks non-breaking and other look-alike spaces. View → Character at the caret says what one is (é U+00E9 · UTF-8: C3 A9).
• From a command line: slate notes.txt:120 opens a file at a line, slate --read-only file opens it read only, slate --wait file returns once its tab is closed (git config --global core.editor "slate --wait"), and some-command | slate - opens what it prints in a new tab.
• Go to line, word wrap, line numbers, show whitespace, the matching bracket highlighted, overtype, zoom, dark and light themes (follows Windows, or switch with the sun/moon button). With Windows' high contrast on, Slate uses its colors, and Magnifier follows the text cursor.
• Tabs in the title bar, as in Windows 11's Notepad (View → Tabs in the title bar puts them back under it). Reopen closed tabs (Ctrl+Shift+T), close the other, the saved or all tabs, and a list of all tabs when they don't fit. The files opened last are on the taskbar button's menu (on Linux, in the desktop's recent files). The status bar counts words and characters, and shows the language, line endings, encoding and indentation: click one to change it.
• Detects and keeps the encoding (UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16, ANSI) and line endings (CRLF / LF). Saving as ANSI asks first if some characters would turn into "?".
• Notices when another program changes an open file; reloads it automatically when you have no unsaved changes (handy for log files).
• A single small Slate.exe that runs from any folder. Help → Open files with Slate… adds it to "Open with", the Start menu and the right-click menu; Help → Stop opening files with Slate… takes that back. Scripts that Windows runs when they're double-clicked (.bat, .cmd, .vbs, .js, .reg, .py…) are left alone: open them with Edit with Slate on the right-click menu.
• Keeps itself up to date: at most once a day it asks GitHub for the latest release, and when there's a newer one an Update button appears in the status bar. One click downloads it, checks it against the release's checksum (and, from 0.8.1, that it's signed by the same publisher) and restarts Slate with your tabs (and their unsaved text) back where they were. If the new version can't start, the old one comes back by itself. Help → Check for updates… does it on demand. (On Linux, apt keeps Slate up to date.) When Windows restarts for an update, Slate opens again with its tabs, as Notepad does (with Restart apps on in Windows' sign-in options).
• Screen readers on Windows (Narrator, NVDA, JAWS) read the text through UI Automation: the line, word or character at the cursor as it moves, the selection and edits, and the tab's name when another tab gets the keyboard; huge files too. Not yet: the tab strip, status bar and menu bar, and Linux (Orca) (docs/ROADMAP.md).

Keyboard shortcuts

The usual ones work as in Notepad (Ctrl+N, O, S, F, H, G, Z, Y, A, X, C, V), plus:

Keys
Ctrl+W / Ctrl+Shift+T	Close tab / reopen the tab closed last
Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+9	Next tab, go to a tab
Ctrl+Alt+S	Save all
Ctrl+P	Print
Ctrl+D / Ctrl+Shift+K	Duplicate / delete the line
Alt+Up / Alt+Down	Move the line up / down
Alt+drag, Shift+Alt+arrows	Column selection
Ctrl+/	Toggle comment
Ctrl+U / Ctrl+Shift+U	lowercase / UPPERCASE
Shift+Alt+F	Format JSON or XML
F3 / Shift+F3	Next / previous match
Alt+L	Show only the lines with a match
Alt+S (in the find box)	Find in selection
Alt+A (in the find box)	Next / previous match through all open tabs
Alt+H (in the find box)	Highlight the search in every tab
Ctrl+F2 / F2 / Shift+F2	Bookmark the line / next / previous bookmark
Alt+Z	Word wrap
Ctrl+Plus / Ctrl+Minus / Ctrl+0	Zoom in / out / reset
Ctrl+Shift+O	JSON and XML structure panel
Insert	Overtype on / off
F5	Insert the time and date

Help → Keyboard shortcuts lists them all. On Linux, Alt+1 … Alt+9 go to a tab too.

Download

Get Slate.exe from the latest release and run it from any folder. It needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. Slate.exe --install sets it up for your account without asking anything (what Help → Open files with Slate… does, for scripts and package managers).

Slate.exe is code-signed (publisher: James Cupps, through Microsoft's Artifact Signing) since 0.8.0. While the certificate is new, Windows' SmartScreen may still show "Windows protected your PC" the first time; choose More info → Run anyway. Each release lists the SHA-256 of Slate.exe (in Slate.exe.sha256) if you want to check the download.

Linux and Raspberry Pi

Slate runs on 64-bit Linux with GTK 4.8 or newer: Debian 12, Raspberry Pi OS 12 (Bookworm, on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5), Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, or similar. To install it, run this line in a terminal; it gets the package for your computer from the latest release (into a new temporary file of your own) and installs it only if that worked:

f=$(mktemp --suffix=.deb) && wget -O "$f" https://github.com/jamesccupps/Slate/releases/latest/download/slate-linux-$(dpkg --print-architecture).deb && chmod 644 "$f" && sudo apt install "$f"

Slate is built for 64-bit systems only (amd64 and arm64): on 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS (dpkg --print-architecture says armhf) the download stops with "404 Not Found".

Or add Slate's apt repository yourself and install it by name, like any other package:

sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/slate-archive-keyring.gpg https://jamesccupps.github.io/Slate/apt/slate-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/slate-archive-keyring.gpg] https://jamesccupps.github.io/Slate/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/slate.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install slate

Slate is then in the menu (Accessories), opens files from the file manager, and slate notes.txt opens a file from a terminal; Help → Open files with Slate… makes it the app that opens text, Markdown, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, log and code files when they're double-clicked. The package also adds Slate's own apt repository (signed; /etc/apt/sources.list.d/slate.list), so sudo apt upgrade keeps Slate up to date along with the rest of the system; removing Slate removes that too. The latest release also has the packages to download yourself (slate-linux-arm64.deb for 64-bit ARM like the Pi, slate-linux-amd64.deb for PCs; install one with sudo apt install ./slate-linux-arm64.deb) and .tar.gz files with the same program to run without installing (those don't update). Its settings, session and crash.log are in ~/.local/share/slate.

The Linux version has the same engine, file handling, colors, find and replace, line tools, JSON/XML tools, menus and status bar as on Windows, in a GTK window, and follows the desktop's light or dark style as it changes. Not on Linux yet:

• high contrast;
• keeping unsaved changes to documents over 64 MB between runs (closing asks about them instead);
• screen readers (Orca) and crash dumps (crash.log only).

Where Slate keeps things

• Settings, the session (open tabs and unsaved text) and crash.log are in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Slate Text Editor (Help → Open settings folder; on Linux ~/.local/share/slate; Slate 0.15 and older kept them in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Slate, and moves them by itself). File → Restore last session turns the session off: closing then asks about unsaved changes, like Notepad used to.
• Portable mode: put an empty file named Slate.portable next to Slate.exe, and Slate keeps all of that, and its temporary files, in a data folder beside it instead (handy on a USB stick or a fast drive).
• Slate running as administrator keeps its own session, apart from the normal one.

Updates and privacy

The update check is one request to api.github.com for the latest release of this repository; it sends nothing about you or your files. Turn it off with Help → Check for updates automatically. Slate doesn't send anything else anywhere. If it crashes, it writes crash.log (and on Windows a small crash dump) in its settings folder, and only there; Help → Report a problem… opens a GitHub issue form with the version filled in, which you can edit and send yourself, attaching those files if you like.

Uninstalling

To keep Slate but stop it opening files when they're double-clicked: Help → Stop opening files with Slate…; the file types you set to open with Slate go back to Windows' own choice. To remove it: if you used Open files with Slate… (or winget), Windows Settings → Apps → Installed apps → Slate → Uninstall removes it. Otherwise just delete Slate.exe. Your settings and unsaved text stay in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Slate Text Editor (or the portable data folder): delete that too if you don't need them any more. On Linux: sudo apt remove slate.

License

MIT: see LICENSE. The libraries built into Slate.exe are listed, with their licenses, in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Building

Windows: needs Rust (the GNU toolchain is enough; no Visual Studio). Run build.cmd, which produces dist\Slate.exe. Linux: Rust and GTK 4's development files (sudo apt install build-essential libgtk-4-dev), then cargo build --release (target/release/Slate); packaging/linux/package.sh makes the .deb. cargo test --lib runs the unit tests, and Slate.exe --test tests\smoke.txt drives the real app in a hidden window (set SLATE_DATA_DIR to an empty folder first: the smoke test writes a session there and reads it back). GitHub Actions builds and tests every push to main, every pull request and every version tag, for Windows and for Linux on x86-64 and ARM64 (on Debian 12, under Xvfb: tests/smoke-linux.txt); a version tag (v1.2.3) drafts a release with Slate.exe, Slate.exe.sha256 and the Linux packages attached. What's planned is in docs/ROADMAP.md.