Runestone Text Editor

Name: Runestone Text Editor
Rating: 4.7 (1893 reviews)
Author: Simon B. Støvring

by Simon B. Støvring

iPhone · iPad

Active Last checked 31 Jul 2026

App Store ↗

Quick verdict

What it is: Store information collected; independent summary not yet available.
At a glance: Free to download
In-app purchases

Categories and search queries

Official categories

Developer Tools

AppCorpus categories

Developer tools

Key functions

Function	Availability	Access	Scope	Evidence
Family Sharing	Yes	Unknown	App Store	Store published
Free app	Yes	Free	—	Store published
In-app purchases	Yes	Limited free	—	Store published

Screens

No screenshots collected yet.

Pricing & paywalls

App Store

Shown for US

Premium — $9.99

Last verified 31 Jul 2026

Ratings & reviews

App Store

Shown for US

4.7 1893 ratings · App Store

5/5I wrote this review in Runestone
A good text editor is like a freshly sharpened chef’s knife. It just FEELS good to use, and it makes you happy. You know what a dull knife feels like and you can appreciate the perfect slicing motion you get from using the right tool for the job. Runestone is the right tool for text editing. It’s gorgeous, powerful enough to tackle editing huge files, and simple enough to jot down some quick notes or whip up a blog post for your static site. Combine this app with a git client, an SSH client, and you can manage your home software stack on the go. Finally, there’s not enough space here to say nice things about the developer, so I’ll leave it at - he’s incredibly thoughtful and responsive. If you have feedback on the app, hit him up on Twitter. Thanks Simon, for dedicating so much time to making this amazing app!!

Slaxx99 · 31 Jul 2026
3/5App is Sluggish Under iPadOS 18
I used to really like this editor. I've been using the free version for a few months now, and it's a nice, cozy, "no frills" alternative to Apple Notes. It's the closest thing to having NotePad++ on my machine as I can get, and I've been enjoying the features I do use. However, I recently updated to iPadOS 18 and, since then, the app has been kind of laggy and sluggish. Prior to getting iPadOS 18, the app would open quietly and go straight to the file selection menu. Now, however, it opens to this screen with a blown-up icon scrolling vertically upward, hangs there and lags my iPad for a couple of seconds, and then opens the file selection menu on the bottom half of the screen rather than the entire screen. This makes me not want to use this particular app, anymore, since I can no longer quickly hop in, jot something down, and hop out. I have no real complaints beyond that. It crashes on occasion when deleting, undoing, or redoing… but that's more acceptable than this new startup sequence. I really dislike it that much.

JCollins2048 · 31 Jul 2026
5/5Best Text Editor
I’ve tried so many text editors from Coda for iOS to Koder to Textastic. They’ve all been “ok”, but the problem I kept coming down to was the syntax highlighting. I’m a web developer and I use Atom on Mac every single day. I discovered this app and the syntax highlighting looked pretty good, but then I found where you can create your own theme and I immediately bought Premium and got to work replicating Atoms theme I use. I got it 90% of the way there and I’m in love. I’ve wanted this for years. THANK YOU. If I could ask for anything it would be tabs for multiple files open at once and maybe a tree view on the left to browse files and folder structure, but other than that I LOVE IT.

dhdeckard · 31 Jul 2026
5/5Outstanding Editor
If you are a VoiceOver user like I am and on iOS 17.4.1, there is one small problem when punctuation is set to anything but all under VoiceOver, verbosity. When walking through a text file line by line, VoiceOver fails to include the last character of every line whether or not the last character is punctuation. Setting verbosity for punctuation to all correctly identifies every character on the line. This editor is quick! A few of the others I've tested that are supposed to work with VoiceOver are so slow they are completely useless. I'm using this editor to write LaTeX documents and it works very well.

WhiplashZamboniMan · 31 Jul 2026
3/5It could be 5…
It’s really good I like it more than a lot of others the problem is it crashes a lot. Both on iPad and iPhone it freezes up a lot. I'm using the copilot app research app for personal use fails and crashes in the middle of me working maybe 50,000 characters big but not insanely big. It will freeze up with without being used. Not recommended to go over 100,000 characters it can open them but it will crash if you try to View them Beyond what's visible. Searching for other apps that won't do this. Y'all need to know because it's really good but this is the exact reason why I will not pay $10 and why I am regretful I paid 10 for a Pythonista because it freezes just trying to open tech files bigger than 1000 characters not exaggerating

Maximus OmegaPrime · 31 Jul 2026

Privacy & accessibility

App Store

Privacy

Data Not Collected Developer declared

Accessibility

No accessibility labels collected yet.

Versions

App Store

1.3.10
- Adds support for syntax highlighting Haskell files. - Fixes an issue where entering marked text did not work properly. This bug would, for example, affect users writing in Chinese. - Fixes an issue where adding a comment to the end of a Swift file would sometimes cause the app to hang infinitely.
1.3.11
Fixes an issue where the placement of the caret was not updated correctly after deleting a word using Option+Backspace.
1.3.12
Fixes an issue where the header in the editor would sometimes display incorrectly after rotating the iPad.
1.3.13
- Adds support for highlighting SQL. - Fixes an issue where code blocks in Markdown were not highlighted.
1.3.14
This update contains fixes for some minor issues.
1.3.15
- Adds setting to set the minimum width of the gutter containing line numbers. Find the new setting in the Lines settings. - Fixes an issue where Markdown was not correctly highlighted.
1.3.16
Fixes issues working with files containing Windows-style line breaks.
1.3.17
- Improves the text layout by trimming leading whitespace on line fragments. This closely matches the text layout of the standard text editors on iOS. - Fixes an issue where invisible character symbols would sometimes be placed incorrectly.
1.3.18
Fixes an issue where the app would sometimes crash when editing documents with nested languages.
1.3.19
Fixes an issue where renaming a file would show the old filename and cause the editor to become unresponsive.
1.3.20
Fixes an issue where the caret would not appear until the second time the text view was selected when running the app on iOS 17.
1.3.21
Fixes an issue where highlighted search results could be covered by the Find & Replace panel.
1.3.6
Attempting to place the caret on the last line in the editor would sometimes move it to the beginning of the document instead.
1.3.7
- Sometimes the position of the caret was not updated after pasting text. - Fixes a few issues that would cause the app to crash.
1.3.8
Adds a customizable toolbar to the editor. The new toolbar is available on iPads running iPadOS 16.1 or later.
1.3.9
Improves support for writing text in Korean, and other languages that use combined glyphs.
1.4.5
- Redesigns the App Icon settings. - Improves the behavior of several toolbar items on the iPad. - Automatic language detection based on file extensions is now case-insensitive. - Improves navigation in font picker on iOS 17. - The text showing the cursor position now scales correctly.
1.4.6
Bug fixes and smaller improvements.
1.4.7
Highlighting inline LaTeX in Markdown documents is now disabled by default. This can be enabled again in Languages settings.
1.4.8
Fixes an issue where text selection could start behaving incorrectly after navigating between word boundaries using a hardware keyboard.
1.5.0
- Introduces a new launch experience for iOS 18. - Enables quick access to creating temporary files from the new launch experience. - Adds the Tintable app icon, suitable for tinting on the Home Screen on iOS 18.
1.5.1
Fixes a performance issue introduced in the document browser in version 1.5.
1.5.2
Replaces the Tintable app icon with a Dynamic app icon. The new Dynamic app icon adjusts accordingly to match the appearance of your Home Screen.
1.6
Brings a fresh new design for devices on the latest iOS and iPadOS and keeps the app running smoothly.
1.6.1 · 15 Sep 2025
Fixes an issue where the "Always Open" option in the Unsupported File Type dialog would be disabled even after purchasing Premium.

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Alternatives

Textastic Code Editor — Same category + similar ratings
Pyto IDE — Same category + similar ratings

Availability by market

No LIVE observation for GB yet.

Data quality & evidence

Page completeness: Live store listing
Last verified: 31 Jul 2026
Sources: App Store

Independent summary has not been published yet.
Screenshots: not yet collected

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Use this page with an AI agent

AppCorpus MCP gives your agent current app data, prices, screens, features and sources.

Example prompt

Compare Runestone Text Editor with Textastic Code Editor.

View JSON

GET /api/v3/apps/1548193893

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          "body": "A good text editor is like a freshly sharpened chef’s knife. It just FEELS good to use, and it makes you happy. You know what a dull knife feels like and you can appreciate the perfect slicing motion you get from using the right tool for the job. Runestone is the right tool for text editing. It’s gorgeous, powerful enough to tackle editing huge files, and simple enough to jot down some quick notes or whip up a blog post for your static site. Combine this app with a git client, an SSH client, and you can manage your home software stack on the go. Finally, there’s not enough space here to say nice things about the developer, so I’ll leave it at - he’s incredibly thoughtful and responsive. If you have feedback on the app, hit him up on Twitter. Thanks Simon, for dedicating so much time to making this amazing app!!",
          "author": "Slaxx99",
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        {
          "rating": 3,
          "title": "App is Sluggish Under iPadOS 18",
          "body": "I used to really like this editor. I've been using the free version for a few months now, and it's a nice, cozy, \"no frills\" alternative to Apple Notes. It's the closest thing to having NotePad++ on my machine as I can get, and I've been enjoying the features I do use. However, I recently updated to iPadOS 18 and, since then, the app has been kind of laggy and sluggish. Prior to getting iPadOS 18, the app would open quietly and go straight to the file selection menu. Now, however, it opens to this screen with a blown-up icon scrolling vertically upward, hangs there and lags my iPad for a couple of seconds, and then opens the file selection menu on the bottom half of the screen rather than the entire screen. This makes me not want to use this particular app, anymore, since I can no longer quickly hop in, jot something down, and hop out. I have no real complaints beyond that. It crashes on occasion when deleting, undoing, or redoing… but that's more acceptable than this new startup sequence. I really dislike it that much.",
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      "version": "1.3.19",
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      "app_id": 1049254261,
      "name": "Textastic Code Editor",
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      "reason": "Same category + similar ratings"
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    {
      "app_id": 1436650069,
      "name": "Pyto IDE",
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      "reason": "Same category + similar ratings"
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