Our story

An editor worth
continuing.

Codeworks did not start from an empty Xcode project. It started with CodeEdit.

A few years ago a group of developers set out to answer a question we had been asking ourselves too: why doesn't the Mac have a fast, beautiful, genuinely native code editor for everything?

They built one.

CodeEdit was ambitious, open source, unapologetically native, and made by a community of people who cared about the details. It proved that a modern editor did not have to feel like a website wrapped inside a desktop window.

We loved that idea.

Over time, development slowed. Issues gathered. Releases came further apart, and a genuinely exciting foundation seemed to be entering a quieter chapter.

We kept using it. Then we started fixing things. One fix became ten. Ten became new systems. New systems became ideas that no longer fit inside a small fork.

Eventually the six of us realized we were not simply maintaining CodeEdit any more.

We were building the editor we wanted to use every day.

That is how Codeworks began.

Today Codeworks has its own direction, product philosophy, features, design language, and ambitions. There is CodeEdit DNA throughout its foundation, and pretending otherwise would erase the work that made ours possible.

Where credit belongs

CodeEdit exists because dozens of people gave their time, ideas, design work, bug fixes, code reviews, testing, and engineering knowledge to an open-source project. To everyone who contributed code, reported a bug, reviewed a pull request, designed an interface, wrote documentation, or took part in the community: thank you. You gave us something unusually valuable. A place to start.

  • Austin Condiff
  • Lukas Pistrol
  • Khan Winter
  • Matthijs Eikelenboom
  • Wouter Hennen
  • Wesley De Groot
  • KaiTheRedNinja
  • Pavel Kasila
  • Marco Carnevali

and everyone who built alongside them

  • Nanashi Li
  • ninjiacoder
  • Cihat Gündüz
  • Rehatbir Singh
  • Angelk90
  • Stef Kors
  • Chris Akring
  • highjeans
  • Jason Platts
  • Rob Hughes
  • Lingxi Li
  • HZ.Liu
  • Richard Topchii
  • Pythonen
  • Javier Solorzano
  • Cosmin Anghel
  • Shivesh
  • Andrey Plotnikov
  • POPOBE97
  • nrudnyk
  • Ben Koska
  • evolify
  • Shibo Tong
  • Ethan Wong
  • Gabriel Moreno
  • Sizhe Zhao
  • Muhammed Mahmood
  • Muescha
  • Alex Sinelnikov
  • Heewon Cho
  • Matt Kiazyk
  • DingoBits
  • Shoto Kobayashi
  • Aaryan Kothari
  • Kyle
  • Nakaoka Rei
  • Alex Deem
  • deni zakya
  • Ahmad Yasser
  • ezraberch
  • Elias Wahl
  • bombardier200
  • Alex Yapryntsev
  • Code-DJ
  • Neilzon Viloria
  • Cubik
  • Renan Greca
  • maxkel
  • Scrap
  • iggy890
  • Sara Tavares
  • luah5
  • Evan Wang
  • Dscyre Scotti
  • Tomáš Boďa
  • Ahmed Attalla
  • Esteban Borai
  • avinizhanov
  • kmohsin11
  • Axel Martinez
  • Federico Zivolo
  • Elvis Wong
  • İbrahim Çetin
  • phlpsong
  • Ahnaf Mahmud
  • Dan K
  • Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg
  • Paul Ebose
  • Daniel Zhu
  • Simon Whitaker
  • Leonardo
  • Levente Anda
  • Nobel
  • Savely
  • Kihron
  • Filipp Kuznetsov
  • rustemd02
  • Simon Kudsk
  • Surya
  • George Tchelidze
  • Chris Pineda

Visit the CodeEdit project ›

Why build something new?

At first we did not intend to. We fixed things because we wanted to use them. Then we changed workflows, rebuilt pieces, added systems, and made different product decisions. Eventually what we wanted to build had become different enough that keeping it as a collection of patches stopped making sense. Codeworks needed its own direction.

Why Codeworks is a paid product

CodeEdit showed what a native, community-built editor for macOS could be. Codeworks is an attempt to turn that foundation into something sustainable.

We are a team of six designing, building, testing, supporting, and improving Codeworks. Rather than relying on spare-time contributions or hoping development continues indefinitely, we chose to build it as a product: one we can work on every day.

You are not paying for the open-source code that came before us. You are paying for what we are building on top of it, and for us to keep building it.

The license

CodeEdit is released under the MIT License, which permits use, modification, and commercial distribution as long as the original copyright and permission notice travel with the software. Those notices ship with Codeworks, and the portions derived from CodeEdit remain governed by their own license.

Copyright (c) 2022 CodeEdit

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Codeworks is not the official continuation of CodeEdit and is not affiliated with the CodeEdit project. It is our own interpretation of where the idea could go next.

And we intend to make that beginning count.

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