If an answer is missing below, we probably do not have one yet — and we will not invent it.
price and licence
The core and the eight bundled plugins are free, with no account and no registration. Paid options — a Pro model, a plugin store — belong to the plans for after the public release; there are no prices or dates, and we will not name them in advance.
The terms of use are set out in the licence agreement. The build includes components under open licences — their list and texts are published in the third-party notices and on the LGPLv3 compliance page. Both are available without registration and readable without JavaScript.
Yes, within the licence agreement. Any specific restrictions are listed in the EULA text — which prevails over the wording on this page.
data and privacy
No. The works with files on disk: no cloud, no sync, no mandatory account. All formats are open and export is always available — if you stop using the editor, the files stay readable in other programs.
What is and is not collected is described in the privacy policy — a document that carries weight, unlike promises on a landing page. No registration is required for the editor to work.
Everything you make sits in open formats: txt, csv, md, epub, fb2, rtf, pdf. None of them is tied to The — other programs open them without conversion. That is a deliberate decision, not a side effect.
capabilities and limits
Yes, and the editor shows you why: the file is memory-mapped, the line index is built in the background, and for large files an explicit mode kicks in — LargeText or HugeSlice — in which some heavy features are deliberately switched off. The mode and its limits are shown in the status bar. Details on the large files page.
The is a native application in C++23 and Qt 6, with no web layer at its base. The core is GUI-independent and built around a persistent Piece Table, mmap and a snapshot model. We do not reinvent proven components: highlighting is tree-sitter, semantics are LSP, regular expressions are RE2, git is libgit2. The comparison is on “Why The”.
No. PDF is read (page thumbnails, text-layer extraction) and rich text can be exported to PDF, but editing a PDF is not supported.
Not yet. Over LSP only C/C++ error diagnostics via clangd are implemented. Hover, go-to-definition, completion and rename are on the roadmap.
platforms and updates
Windows and macOS are supported today. The core does not depend on platform GUI, so there is no technical obstacle, but no public Linux build exists in the 0.4.x line — and we will not promise a date.
Yes. Windows ships as The-setup.exe; macOS as a .dmg disk image in two builds — Apple silicon and Intel. The is distributed from this site only.
Yes, the 0.4.x line is moving and the changelog is public. We draw a hard line between done and planned: anything that does not work yet sits on the roadmap page, not in the features section.