Caxton

About Caxton

Caxton is a native macOS editor for files other editors refuse — production logs, database exports, two-million-row CSVs — and it is one of the rare tools in this catalog that publishes measured benchmarks rather than adjectives. A 10GB text file opens immediately and indexes 80.6M lines in a measured 19.5 seconds, sustained scrolling holds 60fps past 80M lines, and memory footprint on a 10GB document stays under 200MB. That comes from memory-mapped I/O, a piece-table document model and a tiered line index, all AppKit with no Electron involved; the download is 4MB. CSV mode is a genuine second product: delimiter auto-detection, frozen headers, external merge sort on any column with type inference so numeric columns sort as numbers, explicit parse states for malformed rows instead of silent guesses, and column split, combine, extract and dedupe — 1GB and 2M rows by 50 columns parse to a grid in a measured 2.6 seconds. Filtering an 80M-line file returns first matches in under a second, and up to twelve conditions can be combined with AND/OR while remaining scrollable, which is what grep cannot do. Follow-tail handles growing logs. Privacy is absolute by design: files never leave the Mac, with no upload, no cloud processing and no telemetry. When a license lapses the app drops to read-only — you can still open, scroll, search, filter and copy anything — so data is never held hostage.

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