A computing landscape that stays yours.

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. Fork an app from the gallery, or build your own and publish it for anyone to fork.

Nothing is locked away. Apps are sandboxed and declare every host they talk to before you take them; the version you fork 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.

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.

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. There is a free workspace that stays free, and you pay only for the things that genuinely cost us something to run: the people you collaborate with and the storage they fill. The desktop app is free, and what is already on your machine stays yours to use, unpaid, for as long as you like. Stop paying and nothing is taken away: the workspace stops syncing, and the files, the apps and the folder on your disk go on working exactly as they did. 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.