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None of these do anything you need. They are the difference between an app that works and one that feels like it was made by someone who liked using it. All of them step aside when Reduce Motion is on in System Settings → Accessibility, and one timer drives the text animations, eased out, so nothing runs when nothing is moving.

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In the editor

The caret glides. Arrow keys, clicks and typing all move it along a curve rather than teleporting it, and it blinks by fading instead of switching off. When typing carries it to the next line — a word wrapping, a Return — the glide takes a quarter longer, so the long way back to the left reads as one motion. Settings → Caret tunes it, on a live line. (More.) The caret does tricks. Leave it alone for a few seconds and it hops, bounces, flips, wiggles, stretches or leans — then again every several seconds, never the same one twice, until you type. Off in Settings → Caret, and under Reduce Motion. (More.) A strike that sweeps. Check a task and the box pulses, then a line draws itself across the words over about half a second while they fade to the muted colour. The strike is a gradient, accent to muted, not a flat line. Uncheck and the words brighten back with a quieter pulse. Finished tasks sink, gently. A beat after you check a task it fades out, drops below the last unfinished item, and fades back in there; the strike fades with it. Uncheck it and it rises back to its old place. Focus mode breathes. As the caret crosses into a new paragraph the light crossfades from the old one to the new one. Turning focus on settles the dimming over the page rather than dropping it; scrolling lifts it gradually; the next click or keystroke brings it back where the caret landed. The dimmed text keeps its Markdown colours, darker and less saturated. Dates arrive with a pulse. Type @today and a space: the word becomes the date and its capsule pulses once in the accent. The capsule itself is lit from the top with a hairline edge. Links made by pasting pulse too, in the link colour, so you can see the words were wrapped rather than replaced. The chrome steps back while you type. On the first keystroke the footer and the sidebar toggle fade to almost nothing; they return when the pointer moves. The word count ticks. Every number in the app that changes rolls from the old value to the new one rather than flashing: the word count as you type, the footer total, the Documents and Shelf headers, folder counts, tag counts. Inline code sits in a rounded box, quotes get room to breathe, and the syntax marks are there but dimmed — the page reads as prose with the Markdown still in it. An empty document says Start writing at the caret, in the syntax colour, and gets out of the way at the first character.

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In the sidebar

Rows slide in and out as documents come and go: a new one, one you shelved, a search that ends. Stars spring in, in the sidebar and on cards, with a little overshoot. The tag filter chip pops into the header when you click a tag. A dragged row lifts. Press and move a document in the tree and it rises under the pointer with a shadow, the rows it passes spring aside, a folder it is held over glows, and on release it glides into its gap rather than snapping. The month deepens as you write. Today’s cell in the sidebar’s calendar takes on more of the accent as the note grows, word by word; the month slides sideways when you turn it. The search field brightens while it has the keyboard. A folder’s count and its + button trade places smoothly when you hover. The Saved mark springs in at the footer after each write, and the save dot eases between its colours rather than switching. Hover a document row for a moment and the time it was last edited appears. The wordmark at the top is hand-made — a scan of lettering, not a font — and takes the theme’s text colour.

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In All Documents

Cards arrive in a cascade, each a few hundredths of a second after the one above it, and lift on hover with a spring. Opening a card grows it into the page. A plate takes the card’s frame and expands to the editor, then fades; the editor is already there underneath. Esc runs it backwards: the page shrinks into its card. The Dock icon follows the Mac’s appearance. In dark mode it is the same sheet at night — charcoal, the g in paper-white — and it changes the moment the appearance does. ⌘F glides the search field from its spot in the header to the middle of the window, and Esc glides it back the same way. An empty library shows a leaf, and a New Document button.

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In Timelapse

The corridor. Days are cards tilted back in perspective, each smaller and fainter than the one in front, toward a vanishing point below the header, and each dissolving at its foot before it reaches the next. Scrolling walks the corridor continuously, and letting go settles on the nearest day with a spring. The labels say Today and Yesterday before they start giving dates.

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Elsewhere

Review comes in with a breath of scale, and its task checkboxes strike through with a CSS sweep that matches the editor’s. The ⌘K command bar’s highlight glides between rows as you arrow through it. Settings sections crossfade, the rail’s highlight slides between them, and the whole card is translucent over the page it is changing. The Type section sets a piece of page in the current type; the Caret section keeps a caret gliding along a line, blinking as it is set, and it hops there too when the tricks are on. The shortcut sheet is a sheet of the same glass, in the app’s own type. A pin in the footer springs in while the window floats on top (⌘.), and springs out when it stops. The window is glass. Everything behind it — the desktop, another window — shows through the blur, tinted by the theme. Move something behind Glassine and the page changes with it. Opaque in the theme editor turns this off if you would rather it did not. The icon is the wordmark’s lowercase g on a sheet of paper, with ruled lines running in from the left and fading out. It is drawn geometrically at every size by a small script in the repository, so no font is involved. Copy Debug Info (⌘⌥⇧D, in the Help menu) puts the caret’s geometry, the layout and every setting on the clipboard in one paste. Not a delight exactly, but the fastest way to report something odd.