~/about
General Text is software built on a simple belief: that your work should live in plain files you own, in formats that outlast the apps that made them, on machines you control.
What we're building
General Text is a local-first workspace for small, focused apps. Each one reads and writes plain files (Markdown, CSV, JSONL) that sit in a real folder on your disk, sync across your devices, work offline, and open in any other program. Install an app from the gallery, or build your own and publish it for anyone to use.
Nothing is locked away. Apps are sandboxed and can't phone home; the version you install is yours to keep, running locally even if its maker moves on. It is the opposite of software you rent and lose: it is software you keep.
Who we are
General Text is built by Saltbark, a small team that cares about the texture of everyday computing. We trade as the General Text & Computing Company because that is, plainly, what we make: general tools for working with text, and the quiet plumbing that lets them last.
We are people building for ourselves first. We have more ideas for small, useful software than time to ship them, so we built a foundation that lets a tool go from an idea to something real (collaborative, synced, offline-ready, on desktop and phone) without standing up a server or a startup behind each one.
How we're built
Most software degrades on a schedule set by its incentives. When a tool has to grow forever, quality bends toward engagement, lock-in, and the next funding round, rarely toward the person actually using it. We are deliberately structured to avoid that pull: small by choice, sustainable rather than explosive, accountable to the people who use what we make instead of to hyper-growth.
That shows up in concrete ways. Local is free, forever; you pay only for the things that genuinely cost us something to run, like sync and hosting. Your data is plain text on your own machine, so leaving is never a hostage negotiation. And because the files outlive the app, we have to earn your use every day rather than trap it.
We think the internet is better when more software is made this way: user-first, durable, and people-first by design. General Text is our attempt to build a small, lasting corner of it.
Building something in this spirit, or want a tool that doesn't exist yet? We are happy to hear from you. hello@generaltext.org