Some projects are born in consulting work — others get built in the evenings, out of sheer interest in the subject. Feder is firmly in the second category. As of this week, version 1.2 is available for download at wilke-it.consulting/feder. A short note on the app for those who read our news feed.
A note for our international readers: the application itself, and the product page, are currently German only. An English release is on the maybe-later list.
What Feder is
Feder is a writing app for the Mac. It pairs a calm, book-like editing surface with a library that keeps ideas, project outlines and journal entries side by side. As you type, Markdown is rendered directly: headings, emphasis, quotes and lists appear in their final form — but the file underneath stays what it is: a plain .md file in an ordinary folder.
That’s the founding idea. Anyone who writes over years accumulates text. That text should still be readable in ten years — with or without the program it was written in. Which is why: no database, no proprietary format, no cloud account management. Your texts live where you’d look for them — in the file system.
Why another writing app?
Because in our consulting work the same wish kept coming up: an environment for thinking and writing that doesn’t pull your body of work into someone else’s infrastructure. For private notes, journals, project pre-thinking — things you deliberately do not want in a collaboration tool. Feder is the result of that wish.
The design follows the same stance: five colour modes (including two sepia tones), six serif and typewriter typefaces to choose from, plenty of whitespace. Nothing blinks, nothing demands attention. You sit down and you write.
What Feder deliberately does not do
Just as important as what’s in it is what’s missing — on purpose. Feder knows nothing of real-time collaboration or publishing to blogs, no in-line images, no writing goals or word-count analytics. If you need those, there are very good other programs. Feder’s ambition is to be a place to write that you still recognise ten years from now.
The only outbound connections that can happen at all are optional: weather and the day’s headlines in the journal entry, and a daily check for a newer version. The texts you write never leave the device.
Where to get it
Feder runs on macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer and is built exclusively for Apple Silicon (M1 upwards). Intel Macs are not supported at present — a universal build wasn’t possible with the current toolchain. The app is around 2 MB and starts without warnings.
The current release is version 1.2, September 2026, with refinements to the library and search since the first public shipment in July.
Who it’s for (and who it isn’t)
Feder is meant for people who journal regularly and want something calmer than a text field; who collect ideas and project sketches before they become anything; who care that their texts remain readable in ten years without this particular app. Not the target group: teams collaborating on the same text — Feder can’t do that, and it isn’t meant to.
All the details, screenshots and the download live on the product page at wilke-it.consulting/feder. We’d be glad to hear feedback — Feder is expressly a side project, not a roadmap commitment. But that’s exactly what makes the ongoing work pleasantly unhurried.