The plain-file editor is a desktop surface for opening and editing your own .md and .markdown files from disk, without adding them to a vault. It is on by default. It is not a plaintext mode for your vault: your notes are never stored in plaintext, and a file you open this way stays unencrypted, unsynced, and unbacked-up by Myne.
Turning the plain-file editor on or off
It is on by default, so there is nothing to enable. To turn it off, open Settings → Editor → Editing and turn off Plain-file editor. The helper text under the switch states the terms plainly: “Open and edit the .md files you already have on disk, in place, without adding them to a vault. These files are plaintext: Myne does not encrypt them, and changes to them are not synced or backed up. On by default; turn it off here.”
Turning the switch off closes whatever the surface has open, after it writes the edits it still holds. A file whose changes could not be written to disk stays open and the switch reports it, rather than dropping your text on the way out.
The switch is stored on this device rather than in your vault. That is deliberate: the surface has to work with the vault locked and even with no vault at all, and a vault setting cannot be read in those states.
Opening a file
There is no New on this surface, and no Save As outside the conflict banner’s copy arm below. A file always arrives from outside Myne, and Myne edits it where it already is. It can arrive in any of these ways:
- From Myne’s app menu: choose File → Open File… (⌘O on macOS). This is the way to open the first file, because the surface itself only appears once a file is already open.
- From a terminal:
myne open <path>hands the file to the running app through the Myne CLI. - Passed to the app at launch: starting Myne with a file’s path as its argument opens that file. This is the route a Windows or Linux file association uses.
- On macOS, through the system open event: Myne registers itself as an editor for
.mdand.markdown, so Finder’s Open With → Myne and a double-click both hand the file to the surface. A device with the plain-file editor turned off ignores the file silently. - A link: a
myne://open-file?path=...link. Myne resolves the path and shows a confirmation first, stating that the file lives outside every vault, and nothing opens until you choose Open. - From the surface itself: once a file is open, the Open a local file button opens another one through the system’s file picker. Each open file gets its own tab in the surface’s own tab strip.
Only .md and .markdown files open here, up to 64 MiB. Anything else is refused with a message rather than opened.
Dragging a file onto the Myne window is not a way in today: the drop is ignored and no file opens.
Writing, autosave and conflicts
While the surface is open it says what it is, in a strip that never goes away: Local file. Not encrypted, and not part of any vault.
Your edits save on their own a moment after you stop typing, and again when you close the window. There is no Save button. A save checks the file’s content first: if the file changed on disk since Myne read it, nothing is overwritten and a banner appears instead. It reads This file changed on disk while you were editing. Myne has not written anything. and offers Reload from disk, Overwrite with my changes, or Save a copy… under a name you choose. If a save fails for another reason, Myne says so and keeps your edits in the tab.
The surface’s tabs are its own, kept apart from your notes’ tabs. Locking the vault flushes and parks the open files; unlocking again in the same session brings them back. Quitting does not: nothing reopens on the next launch, because Myne keeps no recents list for these files.
Importing a file into your vault
Import to vault copies the open file into a new note and closes the tab. The file on disk stays exactly where it is. The vault has to be unlocked: with it locked, Myne says so and asks you to unlock first, and on a device with no vault yet it asks you to create one.
Limits
- It is not a plaintext mode for your vault. No note is ever stored in plaintext, the surface never reads vault content, and your notes are unchanged by anything here. Import to vault is the one deliberate crossing, and it copies in one direction only.
- The file you open is the only copy. It stays unencrypted, outside every backup Myne takes, and outside sync. If it lives in a folder another program watches, that program sees every save, and if it is deleted or replaced outside Myne, there is no Myne-side copy to restore.
- Autosave runs on a short delay after you stop typing. If Myne is killed inside that window, the last edits may not have reached disk; closing the window normally waits for the pending write first.
- Only
.mdand.markdown, up to 64 MiB. Drag-and-drop onto the window does nothing. Spell check, image rendering, and split panes are not part of this surface.