Runestone: New Text and Code Editor for iOS by Simon Støvring

Alex Guyot, writing for MacStories:

Runestone is the latest app from Simon Støvring, the developer behind Scriptable, Jayson, and Data Jar. Støvring’s apps tend to be focused on developer or automation use cases, filling holes in the iOS and iPadOS ecosystem to aid power users. Runestone mostly falls into the same category, although it also has some wider potential appeal for general purpose writing.

The new app functions as an excellent plain text editor for anyone who needs to write on their iPhone or iPad. It’s simple and thoughtfully designed, and includes a variety of excellent themes to improve your writing experience. Runestone’s marquee feature, however, is its syntax highlighting. For Markdown writers, the app will use simple color schemes (which can be altered to your liking using the theme settings) and subtle style changes to highlight your links, bold and italic words, footnotes, and more. The result is a very simple, essentially plain-text approach which still makes it easy to see your markup at a glance.

I’ve been beta-testing Runestone for a few months, and it’s excellent. Fast and intuitive, Runestone looks and works great on both iPhone and iPad. Because it integrates with the system document browser, you can easily use Runestone to open not just files stored locally on your device and in iCloud, but through any app that provides a standard document browser. Dropbox works great, as does the excellent Secure ShellFish for reading and writing files over SSH.

Runestone is free to download and use. For a one-time $10 purchase, “Premium” unlocks a bunch of customization options and one of the best Easter eggs I’ve seen in years.

★ Monday, 9 May 2022