A rotten editor for rotten files and rotten days.
A small, fast text editor with a sysadmin toolbox bolted to the side. Written in Free Pascal / Lazarus. Runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Ships as a single binary that carries its own fonts.
If you write code for a living, there is nothing for you here. No plugin marketplace, no AI copilot begging to autocomplete your resignation letter, no 400 MB of Electron pretending to be a text editor.
If you are a sysadmin in a hurry, stay. RottenText might save you ten seconds now and then, several times a day.
The editor part opens files and gets out of the way. The Tools menu is the
reason the thing exists: it does the small, annoying, error-prone conversions
you would otherwise do by pasting company secrets into a website called
base64-decode-online-free.ru.
Everything runs in-process. Nothing you type leaves the machine. No telemetry, no "anonymous usage statistics", no phone-home. The masked-entry tools never show, insert, log or copy the secret you typed. This is not a feature, it is the minimum bar, and the fact that it needs stating tells you everything about the tools you were using before this one.
Hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2) and HMAC, of a selection or of a whole file. Base64,
URL, HTML and hex encode/decode. Escaping for Bash, PowerShell, JSON, YAML, SQL,
sed, regex, systemd and nginx. Unix permissions both ways, and umask. Password,
UUID, token and API key generation. .htpasswd entries (bcrypt by default) and
LDAP userPassword values, plus ready-made LDIF entries.
Validate, format and sort JSON, XML, YAML, INI and TOML. Kubernetes Secrets and
ConfigMaps, encoded and decoded. .env files: sort, deduplicate, redact, convert
to and from JSON and YAML. Docker Compose and Podman Quadlet: list images, pull
the environment out, retag. Terraform variables and tfvars skeletons. Helm values
skeletons, and a cross-check of what a template uses against what values.yaml
actually defines.
IPv4 and IPv6 CIDR calculator. Timestamp converter. Cron and systemd timer
explainer, with the next runs. JWT inspector. X.509 certificate inspector,
written from scratch, no OpenSSL. Mail trace: rebuilds a message's path from its
Received: headers and explains the antispam verdict. Log toolkit: normalize,
sort, merge, deltas, summary. Extract and count IPs, URLs, emails, UUIDs and
hashes. Diff against a file, in a live two-pane view you can edit.
Tabs, split view, minimap, find and replace with a live match counter, dozens of encodings with autodetection, per-document line endings preserved on save, hex view for binaries, syntax highlighting for 40-odd languages, 19 themes, a folder sidebar, macros, a command palette, printing with colors, and sessions that survive you closing the window by reflex at the end of a 14 hour shift.
No regular expressions in find-and-replace. If you want regex search across a whole tree, you want a different tool and probably a change ticket.
A .csv can open as a table instead of text: cells edited in place, rows and
columns selected, moved, duplicated, deleted, sorted with a right-click on the
header, found and replaced cell by cell, hashed or encoded like any other
selection, with undo. It saves back to CSV with the delimiter, line endings
and encoding it found, and nothing else. No formulas, no charts, no pivot
tables: it is there for the export you have to patch before the import, not to
replace the thing accounting uses. Multiplan nostalgics will feel right at
home: the rotten looks are all there, the formulas are not, and the 64 KB
stayed in 1982 with the rest of your career.
A file that is not text opens as hex, and any file can be reopened that way. Offset, bytes, ASCII, the usual three columns. Overwrite bytes in place, search for a byte sequence or a string, jump to an offset, replace with something of the same length, because this is a hex editor and not a word processor. Edits stay in memory until you save, so the firmware image, the corrupted PDF or the config of that appliance nobody dares to reboot keeps its chances. It will not disassemble anything, and it will not fix your backups either, mostly because you do not have any.
Prebuilt packages for Windows, Linux and macOS are on the releases page. Download, unpack, run.
If you are the kind of sysadmin who compiles everything from source "for security", we both know you haven't read the source, so just grab the package.
For the three people who insist. You need Lazarus (tested with 4.8) and
FPC 3.2.2, and the SynEdit, LCL and Printer4Lazarus packages. The
Linux build uses GTK3, which needs Lazarus trunk; the build script says so if
yours is too old.
The interface kit, the fonts (20 Monaspace Frozen, 4 JetBrains Mono NL
Nerd Font, 4 Hack Nerd Font) and the themes come from the
RottenUI submodule, so clone with
--recurse-submodules, or run git submodule update --init afterwards.
scripts/build.ps1 # Windows (-Release for the small binary)
scripts/build.sh # Linux (--release)
scripts/make-app.sh # macOS: builds the .app bundle, not just the binarysyntax/ must sit next to the executable at runtime. Fonts and themes do not:
the binary carries them.
Packaging scripts for the installer, the .deb and the .dmg live in
dist/.
The manual, in English and in French. It documents every tool, and is honest about the limits of each one, which is more than most manuals do.
GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.
The binary embeds the Monaspace font family and JetBrains Mono NL Nerd
Font (both SIL Open Font License 1.1), Hack Nerd Font (MIT and Bitstream
Vera License) and the Tabler icons (MIT), and
statically links RottenUI, the LCL, the Free Pascal RTL and SynEdit. Every
third-party work
that ends up in a build is inventoried in
LICENSE_THIRD_PARTIES.md, with what a redistributor
has to do about it. If you repackage RottenText, read that file. It is short.
(c) 2026 Cyril LAMY.