What changed, in plain words.

1.3.5 OCTOBER 14, 2026

Move to Trash asks first only when you pick 2 or more files. With 1 file, it goes straight to the Trash, and ⌘Z puts it back.

In a text file open in the reader, click in the text, then ⌘A and ⌘C take the whole text Kepter shows. Before, a selection stopped after about 4,000 characters.

Find matches more of what you type. “w2” and “w-2” find a W-2. “koln” finds Köln. “.jpg” finds JPG files. “$1,250” finds the $1,250.00 receipt, not a $250.00 one. An emoji finds the files that have it in their text. While Kepter is still indexing, a small ring shows beside ESC in Find.

Find shows no results when you add keyboard mash to a word, such as “invoice zzqxjvkw”. Before, it listed invoices.

Find shows results while you're still typing. Before, the first letter could freeze the field for about a second, and no results showed until Kepter had gone through your whole library.

Small icon buttons, such as the Settings gear, Help, Open Window and the clear button in the search field, take a click up to 12 points from the icon's centre.

Buy Now on the trial banner and on the “Kepter stops working” notice, and the trial line in Kepter's menu, open checkout in your browser. Before, they opened the plan panel first.

In Kepter's menu in the menu bar, the drawer item says Show Drawer or Hide Drawer to match the drawer. It and Find… show your own shortcuts on the right, like any Mac menu. With “Hide the tab” on, the line under it in Settings names the shortcut, such as “Show Drawer: ⌃⌥D”.

If a file is in a folder Kepter can't write to, Rename is dimmed in the tile menu, the reader's menu and the version list. If a rename still fails, you see “Can't access the folder.” Before, you saw a macOS error.

If macOS reports a crash, a freeze, or heavy CPU or disk use to Kepter, Kepter sends the type of problem and which part of its own code it was in. It carries no file names, no paths and nothing from your files. Turn off Share Analytics in Settings and Kepter sends none of it. A copy stays in Kepter's log on your Mac, and Send Feedback attaches that log when you send feedback.

During Rebuild Index, a file you just saved is read first. Before, it could wait behind the rest of your library for minutes.

Kepter stays quick when tens of thousands of new files are waiting to be read. Before, every file that joined made the next one slower to add.

Kepter stops trying to read files that are gone from your Mac. Before, it tried again on every refresh.

A Move to Trash, Undo or Unzip that fails shows a short sentence from Kepter, not a macOS error.

1.3.4 OCTOBER 11, 2026

The tab on the edge of your screen no longer catches clicks meant for the window beside it, such as a button near the edge of a Gmail window. The tab is smaller around the edges; the part you see is the same.

Kepter opens when you log in. It turns this on once after setup, and once when you update. Turn it off with Launch at login in Settings, under Appearance, and it stays off.

Stop Watching asks "Stop watching “Folder”?" first. If you go ahead, that folder's tiles leave the window, the drawer, Stacks and your pins. Your files stay where they are, and the tiles come back if you add the folder again.

The Sealed filter is now called Archives, in the drawer, the window and Group by Kind.

Share Analytics, in Settings under Privacy & Security, sends anonymous usage counts, such as finishing setup. They carry no file names and nothing from your files. In the download it's on unless you turn it off; in Setapp it's off until you turn it on.

Wording across the app now matches other Mac apps: Buy Now, Trial Ended, Restore Purchases, Pause Indexing, Rebuild Index and Show in Finder.

A PDF Kepter can't open shows "Can't read" on its tile right away. A PDF with a password shows "Needs password".

A big text file opens at once. Before, the window could freeze for half a minute while it laid out the text.

Rebuild Index, which used to be Erase, keeps your Stacks, their names, your pins and your reminders. It only clears what Kepter read from your files.

The trial ends at day 30 even when your Mac is offline or its clock is wrong. Kepter closes anything open and shows Trial Ended with Buy Now.

On the Trial Ended screen, Restore Purchases shows a Paste Code field if it finds no purchase on this Mac, so a Kepter Code from another Mac works there.

After you pay, Kepter unlocks by itself. "Waiting for checkout" and "Check again" are gone.

The trial line and the Buy Now button sit above the Dock. Before, a Dock at the bottom covered them.

The trial line says the true number of days left in the menu bar and the drawer.

If a payment fails, Settings, under Storage & Plan, shows the date your access ends and Update Payment Method, instead of the trial screen.

1.3.3 OCTOBER 11, 2026

If Kepter is running from somewhere it can't update itself, such as straight from the disk image, it asks "Move Kepter to your Applications folder?" Choose Move to Applications and Kepter copies itself to the Applications folder, opens from there and ejects the disk image if there is one. Before, a copy like that never updated, and only Check for Updates said why. Choose Not Now and Kepter asks again the next time it opens, once a day at most. Check for Updates asks the same question.

The number of items saved matches in Storage & Plan, Kepter's menu in the menu bar and the window, and all three change right after Move to Trash or Undo. Before, the window could show the old number for minutes.

After Kepter restarts, the reading count carries on, such as "Reading 1,860 of 6,090". Before, it started again at 0 of what was left, such as "Reading 0 of 4,232".

Zip, disk image, audio and video files no longer show "Kepter can't check this one." on their tile, or "Kepter couldn't read this one." in a pile. Nothing had gone wrong with them.

A file that's in iCloud but not downloaded to this Mac no longer shows "Kepter can't check this one." Kepter doesn't download it to read it.

Tile labels are shorter, so they fit: "Not checked yet" is now "Checking", "Kepter can't check this one." is now "Can't read", and "You said Not the same." is now "Not the same". Point at "Can't read" to see the full sentence.

Esc no longer closes Settings. ⌘W closes it now, and its close button works on the first click. Before, ⌘W did nothing and the close button could take 2 clicks.

On a smaller screen, the first onboarding window now sits beside the drawer. Before, the drawer covered part of it.

Kepter uses less memory while it reads photos and PDFs. In one test on 353 files, the most memory it used at once went from 865 MB to 473 MB.

Numbers over 999 show a separator everywhere, such as "1,368 items" in the Move to Trash confirmation.

1.3.2 OCTOBER 10, 2026

After the 30-day free trial, Kepter stops working until you choose a plan. The drawer, the window and Find show "Free trial over" and the plans. Before, only reading stopped, and Find and Open kept working. Your files stay where they are, in Finder.

Choose a plan and Kepter starts again, including a pass over anything you saved while it was stopped.

The first time you open the drawer, a note says "Free for 30 days", with a "See plans" button that shows $2.99 a month or $39 one time. Kepter's menu in the menu bar now shows the days left on every day of the trial, such as “Free trial: 12 days left”, and in the last 7 days a note in the drawer says how many days are left, such as “Free trial: ends in 5 days”.

If your 30 days were already over when Kepter 1.3.2 first opened on your Mac, Kepter keeps working for 7 more days and shows the date it stops.

If a monthly payment fails, Kepter keeps working for 14 more days and shows the date it will stop, so you can update your payment first. Cancelling a plan, or a refund, gets no extra days.

After you pay in your browser, Kepter unlocks on its own when you come back to it. If it hasn't yet, "Check again" on the "Free trial over" screen checks right then.

If you paid once, Settings no longer shows "Manage plan…", which led to the page for cancelling a monthly plan.

Remove Kepter could erase your Kepter code, and a plan you'd paid for stopped showing on that Mac. Kepter now keeps a second copy of the code on this Mac.

On a second Mac, Restore under "Already have Kepter?" now asks for your Kepter code and tells you where to find it: Settings, Storage & Plan, Copy, on your first Mac. Before, it checked only the new Mac and nothing happened.

A file you drop on the drawer from a folder Kepter watches now shows there, text and code files included, and stays after you restart Kepter. Drop one from anywhere else and Kepter says "Kepter shows files from the folders it watches. To keep this one, watch its folder in Settings > Watching."

If you renamed a file you'd just dropped on the drawer while Kepter was still reading, it could leave the drawer for good. It stays now.

If you chose Undo after Move to Trash on a file you'd dropped on the drawer, the file came back to its folder but not to the drawer. It comes back to both now.

A Finder alias dropped on Kepter now keeps the file it points to, and a drop that keeps nothing says why.

Word, Pages, OpenDocument, EPUB and .eml files copied off a USB stick, a network share or a Windows zip could be skipped and never get a tile. Kepter shows them now.

A file moved from one watched folder to another could disappear from Kepter, even though it was sitting in the new folder. It happened when the move arrived as a copy first, which an iCloud Desktop can do. Kepter follows the move now and shows the file in its new folder right away.

The Move to Trash confirmation sometimes didn't appear, so nothing happened when you chose Move to Trash. It appears every time now.

In the window, the count over a list (“N items”) follows your search and matches the tiles under it. It drops at once when you move a file to the Trash, and when a file leaves its folder. While you search, the kind chips and the All places menu are hidden, because search looks at your whole library.

If Kepter was waiting for you to step away, it could still read one more file after Remove Kepter, Start over or the end of the trial. It doesn't now.

A file that takes too long to read is no longer retried on every pass. Kepter waits 1 day, then 3, then 7 before it tries that file again.

A recording with no speech in it, such as a music track, was transcribed again on every launch. Kepter now tries it again only after 30 days or a macOS update.

Kepter holds less memory with a big library open. When your Mac says it's short of memory, Kepter lets go of thumbnails it can draw again later, and brings them back afterward.

Each Move to Trash left about 60 MB of memory behind that Kepter never gave back, so trashing many files in one sitting kept making Kepter bigger. Its memory stays level now.

Kepter rewrote its whole library file after reading each file. In one test that was 8.6 GB written to disk in 23 minutes. With more than 500 files, it now saves its reads in batches, a few seconds apart.

A file you drop on Kepter no longer waits behind a large file Kepter is reading. Before, one big installer or video could make a drop wait tens of seconds.

The drawer has a Help button, next to the button that opens the full window. Before, with only the drawer open, Help (online) in Kepter's menu in the menu bar was the only way to Help.

Settings and the plan panel stayed in front of Help or Finder after you opened one from Settings. They step back now.

If Kepter's window was saved too small to use, or on a screen that's no longer there, it now opens at a normal size in the middle of your screen. Open Kepter no longer shows a tiny empty window after you close the first onboarding window early.

On a short screen, the Dock could cover the bottom of the first onboarding screen, Terms of Use link included. It fits now.

If your Mac's keychain was reset, Kepter could show the same startup problem on every launch. It starts a fresh library now and reads your folders again.

After Remove Kepter, Kepter could start a new library right away and put a new key in your Keychain. It doesn't now.

After Remove Kepter, Finder could show a temporary copy of Kepter that couldn't be moved to the Trash. It shows the real app now.

Send Feedback (online) could say it attached the activity log when your mail app dropped it. It attaches the log only in Apple Mail now, and shows kepter.log in Finder so you can attach it yourself.

Settings had a switch, "Show Private at the bottom of Stacks", that did nothing. It's gone. Privacy & Security now counts medical, financial and identity documents as "N sensitive items", and Appearance has Sensitive previews, Quiet or Show, for whether their tiles show the contents or only the name.

Settings and Export said “1 items” for a single item. They say “1 item” now.

The date of your next payment didn't show under Storage & Plan, and neither did the date a cancelled plan ends. Both show now.

Settings no longer has an Account pane. It showed your name and a line saying there was no account.

1.3.1 SEPTEMBER 30, 2026

Search shows matches from the first letter you type. Find shows your recent files before you type. Typing into search no longer waits, even while Kepter is reading.

New stack's name field didn't take typing if you started typing right after opening it, so Create stayed disabled. You can type a name for a new stack again.

Help, Settings and Undo in the menu bar now work when no Kepter window is open.

Kepter no longer stops reading when you search while it's still reading a new library.

Selecting thousands of files at once no longer freezes the window.

1.3.0 SEPTEMBER 28, 2026

Rename used to change only what Kepter showed you. It renames the real file now, so Finder shows the new name too and it stays after you quit Kepter. Command-Z undoes your last Move to Trash or Rename, the same shortcut as everywhere else on your Mac.

• Get Info, Print, Copy as Pathname (Option-Command-C), and the arrow keys now work the way they do in Finder. Command-Delete also works with a document open in the reader, not just on a tile. Escape works one step at a time: it clears the search box before it closes it, and it steps out of Rename or a prompt without closing the document underneath.
• The reader shows a photo, PDF, or document edge to edge instead of in a frame. On a wide window, Get Info sits open beside it; on a narrower one, it's still one click away.
• When Kepter piles two versions together that don't belong in the same pile, "Not the same" splits the wrong one out on its own, and "Not the same, after all" puts it back.
• Opening a zip opens it like anything else; unzipping is its own button, now in the reader too, not just on the tile's menu. What comes out lands beside the zip, in the same real folder.
• Recording a new shortcut for Find or the drawer could silently take over Kepter's other shortcut instead of reaching the recorder, so the "Kepter already uses that key" warning never fired. It reaches the recorder every time now, and the warning names the other action.
• A very large PDF, TIFF, or other document used to be read whole into memory before Kepter could show it, or before Export Everything could copy it out, the same kind of spike a 58GB zip once caused. Both read only what they need now, straight off the real file. A file too large to read safely is skipped, and Kepter says so. A file you just saved or changed also jumps ahead of a large backlog now, instead of waiting for it to finish first.
• Settings, Stacks, and Get Info now sit on their own cards, on one dark background across the drawer, the window, and Settings. Blur is back on Find and on confirmation dialogs, and photo, video, and document tiles get a fine edge.
• Settings could open a second window on top of the first. It's one window now.
• The drawer docked to the right edge only. Drag it to the left edge and it stays there.
• Pause could leave a folder watch running underneath it, and a pause saved before you quit could start a fresh sweep on your next relaunch. Pause, and a saved pause, now stop watching for real.
• Settings, About shows the build number next to the version now, so two builds of the same version can be told apart.
• Opening Kepter again while it's already running brings the running copy forward instead of starting a second one.
• "Show in Finder" is "Reveal in Finder" everywhere in the app, and the permission text for Documents, Desktop, and Downloads says what's actually true: Kepter keeps no copy of your files, and moves one only when you ask, and only to the Trash.

1.2.4 SEPTEMBER 20, 2026

Kepter installs its own updates now. It checks every 4 hours instead of once a day, and installs once you've stepped away: 60 seconds without touching your Mac, or 5 minutes with the drawer open. Turn it off in Settings, under Privacy & Security: "Install updates automatically".

• When an update is waiting for you, Kepter says so in the menu, on the menu bar icon, and in the drawer and the window. Nothing opens in front of what you're doing.
• If Kepter quits unexpectedly twice in a row right after launching, the next launch pauses reading, checks for an update right away, and tells you what it found. "Start reading again" reads without waiting for one.
• The trial countdown now also shows in the window and the menu.
• A recording that arrived in a watched folder while Kepter was already transcribing others waited for the next change in that folder, or for the next launch. Kepter picks it up in the pass that's running. Reading got this fix in 1.2.2.
• Pause stopped reading and left transcription running. It stops both now, and both continue when you resume.
• When macOS's speech recognizer turns a recording down, the activity log records the reason macOS gave, so "Send Feedback (online)" carries it. It said only that the transcript came back empty.
• Onboarding's second screen says "Reading stops while you're on your Mac". It said "It stops", and since 1.2.3 tiles and thumbnails arrive while you watch.

1.2.3 SEPTEMBER 16, 2026

In 1.2.1 and 1.2.2, if you had allowed Speech Recognition and a recording sat in a folder Kepter watches, a transcription that was stopped part-way could stop it while Kepter was still reading the audio, and macOS ended Kepter.

• Kepter now finishes the piece of audio it's reading before it stops.
• Nothing you've already saved changes, and nothing gets read again.
• Since 1.2.0, the first look through a big folder waited until you stepped away from your Mac, so watching it meant seeing nothing. Tiles and thumbnails arrive while you watch now. Reading still runs when you step away, and the drawer says so instead of showing a count that looks stuck.

1.2.2 SEPTEMBER 16, 2026

While Kepter first read a folder with a lot of images, it could stop answering for a few seconds at a time. Every progress update asked macOS whether Kepter launches at login, and each answer held up the app.

• Kepter asks that question once now, when you open Settings, and never while it's reading.
• Nothing you've already saved changes, and nothing gets read again.
• A file that lands in a watched folder while Kepter is still reading earlier ones is read in the same sitting now. It used to wait for the next change in that folder, or the next launch.

1.2.1 SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

A customer's Kepter used up all the memory on his Mac and got force-quit by macOS, on September 15, 2026. Every version since 1.0.0 read a whole file into memory to identify it; Kepter reads it in small pieces now.

• A 40GB file now costs Kepter about what a small one does. Nothing you've already saved changes, and nothing gets read again.
• A zip shows what's inside it without Kepter reading the whole archive, however big the zip is.
• A zip with a self-extracting installer stub in front of it lists correctly now.
• A zip Kepter can't read shows its size instead of a wrong count.
• Hide the drawer's tab and open the drawer with the keyboard shortcut instead. The toggle is in Settings under Appearance, next to the tab's size, position, and color, and it names the exact key that opens and closes the drawer, updating if you ever change it.
• Kepter keeps an activity log on this Mac now. For each file it reads, it notes the file's name and size, what Kepter was doing to it, and how much memory that took. It holds no text from inside your files. Send Feedback (online) attaches it, and Settings, under Privacy & Security, has a Reveal in Finder button for it.
• A recording longer than 3 hours is transcribed up to 3 hours. Transcription now runs in 10 minute stretches, so a word right on the join between two stretches can be missed.

1.2.0 SEPTEMBER 9, 2026

Day 31 used to stop you finding and opening your own things. That was the wrong end of the app to close. Kepter keeps no copy of anything, so finding is how you reach what you saved, and withholding it locked people out of their own documents. The entitlement has moved to the other end.

• Find and Open now work forever, in every state, on everything Kepter has already read. That does not expire and it costs nothing.
• What a plan buys is Kepter carrying on reading things it has not read yet. Stop paying and it stops reading, and nothing you already have is taken away.
• Six days before the free 30 end, the drawer says so, and you can dismiss it a day at a time. Before this the number lived in a settings pane the app never pointed at, so day 31 arrived as a surprise.
• Kepter gets out of your way while you work. Every heavy job now waits while you are using your Mac, not just some of them; one of the ones that did not wait was redrawing up to sixty pages of a PDF at a time. A customer stopped using Kepter over this and he was right.
• Those jobs run at the lowest priority macOS offers, so the system holds them back when you need the machine.
• Kepter reads your newest files first, so what you saved this week is there while the rest is still arriving.
• Open or search something Kepter has not read yet and it reads that one thing right then, rather than making you wait for everything else.
• A photo over 200MB got no thumbnail at all. Kepter read the whole image into memory and decoded it at full camera resolution, then shrank it. Anything that big was skipped rather than risk the read. It decodes straight to thumbnail size now. The bug is fixed, and every photo also uses about 18 percent less memory at its peak while it's read. Decoding still costs what it costs, so this is not faster.
• Kepter used to look five folders down and no further, without saying so. A bill under Documents, Clients, 2026, Acme, Invoices, Q3 is six down, so it was never seen and never counted. There is no depth limit now.
• The progress line is a plain count. It used to guess at a finish time and say eleven hours one moment and seven the next.
• Setting up is two screens: which places to watch, then what is about to happen and how many files it will be.
• You pick Kepter's keyboard shortcuts. Settings has a Shortcuts pane: click either key, press whatever you want instead, and Kepter uses it from then on, everywhere.
• The drawer's shortcut has moved from ⌘⌥D to ⌃⌥D. macOS uses ⌘⌥D to show and hide the Dock and the system wins that contest, so the drawer's key had never worked for anyone.
• Settings could not receive a single keystroke when it was opened from the menu bar. Every field in it was there to be typed into, and none of them could be.
• Kepter has a new icon. It was a pink letter K; it's a white K on a near-black rounded square now, in Kepter's own typeface.
• The menu bar menu has two new rows that open your browser. What's New (online) goes to kepter.app/changelog. Send Feedback (online) opens a mail to hello@kepter.app with your Kepter and macOS versions already in the subject line. "(online)" marks both, so you know before you click that they leave the app.
• Check for Updates now shows which version you're running, and Settings opens with ⌘, like every other Mac app.
• Cancelling happens inside Kepter. Settings shows your plan, the date of the next payment, and a button. If it cannot reach the server it hands you the payment provider's own flow rather than telling you it failed.
• Buying works. The checkout address was never actually put into the app, so the button could not do anything at all.
• The checkout link would have failed even after that was fixed, because the customer's identifier was going into the wrong part of the address.
• After you pay in the browser, Kepter notices. It had been asking a cache that holds its answer for five minutes while the check itself ran for two, so it could ask forty times and be told the same stale no.
• The browser can get back into Kepter when you finish paying, instead of leaving you to go and find the app yourself.
• "Manage plan" used to open a page on this site that has never existed.
• A new install was told Kepter was watching no folders, at the same moment it was watching Downloads and had already read what was in it. Anyone who took the setup Kepter recommends saw this.
• Escape closes an open document, and closes a playing video. Only the small cross did before, and every key pressed after Escape went into the reader instead of the search box.
• Every sign-in since 1.0.0 quietly called a server that was never switched on, kept a token nothing read, and wrote the failure to a log. Those calls are gone.

1.1.1 SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

A person on the trial pointed a 32 GB MacBook Pro at a big folder and Kepter seized up: the window stopped drawing, the panel would not close, and the fans ran until he forced it to quit. Six separate things caused that, and all six are fixed. Every one of them was Kepter redoing work for the whole library when only a few files had changed, which is why it only showed up on a folder with a lot in it.

• Every file Kepter read caused it to rewrite everything it knew, from the beginning, to disk. On a folder with thousands of files that is an enormous amount of writing for a small amount of new information. It now writes what changed, on a sensible rhythm, and never leaves a small library any less safe than it was.
• Two small facts about each tile, its kind and its name, were stored so that changing one rewrote the whole list and showing one read the whole list. Scrolling alone could do that hundreds of times a second, with nothing being read at all. Both are held in memory now and written back occasionally.
• Kepter was preparing the full window and the search index constantly, even when neither was open, and throwing the result away. It prepares them when you open them.
• Finding images that look alike compared far more pairs than it needed to. Images that are mostly one flat colour, dark screenshots and blank scans all resemble each other in the same narrow way, and Kepter was measuring every one of them against every other one. It still finds genuine near-duplicates.
• Once Kepter fell behind it stayed behind. Each round of catching up could begin before the last had finished, so they piled up and it never recovered. Rounds now wait for each other and space themselves out when there is real work to do.
• The store of prepared tiles was smaller than a large library, so every pass threw away everything the pass before it had just made.
• Playing a video quit Kepter outright, in every version until now.
• A search that found nothing showed a blank panel. It says nothing matched, and gives you a way back.
• Three buttons that say Settings now open Settings.
• The tab stays attached to the drawer when you change how many columns it shows.
• Kepter no longer tells you it lost folders you never gave it.

1.1.0 SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

Most of this came from people who wrote in on launch day. One reported that Kepter brought a 16 GB MacBook Pro to a stop, one got stuck on an empty filter with no way out, and one asked for a way to keep his dictation recordings out of the drawer. All three are fixed or built here.

• Kepter could use far more memory than it needed to, enough to bring a Mac to a stop. It kept up to four thousand thumbnails in memory and counted them rather than measuring them, so a large library could ask for many gigabytes. It now limits them by the memory they take, and when it releases one it releases the oldest rather than the one on your screen.
• Anything Kepter could not open at the moment it looked now gets another try. Before, a folder that was briefly unreachable at launch, or a drive that was unplugged, retired that file's thumbnail for good. That is why things saved most recently could sit in the drawer with no thumbnail while older ones had theirs.
• Thumbnails are made at the size they are shown. They were three times larger than any tile could display, which cost memory, disk space, and time on the first read, and nobody could see the difference.
• Choosing a filter that matches nothing no longer traps you. The filter row used to disappear when there were no results, taking with it the only way to clear the filter, and the empty message claimed your library was empty when it was only filtered. It now names what is empty, says the rest is still there, and offers a way back to everything.
• The count beside the filters counts what the drawer can actually show.
• The reader is opaque. It was almost opaque, and the remainder was enough to read a bright document through the words on top of it.
• Reading a PDF: search inside the document, with every match marked and the page brought to the current one. It says which page you are on. Zoom in, out, and back to the whole page, where fit now means the whole page rather than only its width. Up and down walk the pages; left and right still move between things you have saved.
• Hide a kind of file from the drawer. Right-click anything and hide every file of that kind, or manage the list in Settings under Watching. They stay in the full window, in search, and in every count, so nothing is hidden from you, only from the recent feed.
• Drag the filters into the order you use them. The order is yours everywhere they appear.
• Markdown files are drawn as documents, with their headings, lists and emphasis, instead of the raw marks.
• Kepter no longer asks about updates while it is still opening. That question arrived in the same moment as the drawer and the first read, and the three of them fought over the pointer. The choice lives in Settings under Privacy and Security, with a line saying exactly what is checked.

1.0.1 SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

• Online-only files in Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Box are no longer downloaded by Kepter. Only iCloud placeholders were recognized before, so watching a Dropbox folder full of online-only files could pull all of them onto your Mac. A Hacker News reader asked exactly this on launch day. Kepter now recognizes every cloud placeholder the same way, skips it, and reads the file once it is downloaded. The open item names the service the file is waiting in.

1.0.0 SEPTEMBER 4, 2026

The 0.1 releases of August were a testing build. 1.0.0 is the first release meant for anyone else.

Kepter started as a cloud product: your things copied and held across three cloud providers, with a restore promised if you ever lost your Mac. That plan changed. Kepter reads what you save where it already sits and keeps no copy of its own, which means there is nothing to restore if the original is gone. The code changed weeks ago. Some of the words in the app took longer to catch up, and this release is largely that catch-up, done in the open.

• Every word of every page is now read: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text, Markdown, CSV, saved emails, saved web pages, and Pages, Numbers, and Keynote files. Until now only PDFs were read in full; everything else was findable by its first page only.
• Zips, installers, and disk images used to be invisible in Kepter. They now show as sealed tiles with a count of what is inside, never opened, and a zip is findable by the names of the files in it. Saved web addresses show as cards with their title and site.
• Sort by what the document says, not by file attributes: the amount, the date printed on it, or who it is from. Group by time, kind, or sender. Whatever is active shows as a small pill with one click to reset.
• The open item now says where the original truly is: on this Mac, in iCloud but not downloaded, on a drive that is not plugged in, or in the Trash.
• A date Kepter finds inside a document offers Remind me. One click, and the reminder brings you back to that exact thing.
• Versions of one document stack as one tile with a count. In the full window each version shows its date and one line of what changed. Three buttons: Keep this one, Keep all, Not the same. Not the same is remembered, so that pair never groups again.
• The Settings section that offered to delete an account is gone. There was never an account to delete.
• Settings used to say your saved things were "tied to this account, so it can be restored on a new device." The printed Recovery Kit said your things would come back and pointed at a Restore button that was never built. Neither was true. Both now say what is actually real: the Recovery Kit decrypts Kepter's memory of what you saved, not the things themselves.
• Kepter can now check for its own updates and install them, so a mistake we ship gets fixed automatically instead of sitting in every copy until someone notices and re-downloads by hand.
• Voice memos are transcribed on your Mac or not at all. Before this, a Mac without on-device transcription would quietly send the audio to Apple's servers instead, which contradicted the point of keeping everything local. An untranscribed memo is still saved and still findable by name.
• Scanned PDFs (the kind with no real text underneath, just an image of a page) are now read page by page, not just the cover. Old scans already in Kepter get upgraded the next time they're touched.
• The minimum requirement is now macOS 26 on Apple Silicon, and Kepter says so up front instead of installing anyway. Before, the app would install on older Macs and quietly fall back to plain text search with none of the plain-language finding it's built around. Now it says no rather than pretending to work.
• Sign in with Apple is gone from the direct download at kepter.app. Apple does not support it outside the App Store, so it built, signed, and notarized cleanly and then silently failed to open. The direct download never needed an account anyway; a purchase is tied to a private code instead, shown and copyable in Settings, which you paste on a new Mac to bring your plan across.
• Pricing is final: free for 30 days, no card required. After that, $2.99 a month, the founding price, kept for life even after the price rises to $4.99. Or $39 one time, for life, before that price becomes $59.
• Settings now says your plan status plainly: days left in the free month, the price, or that your access has ended. Never a dead button pretending to work.
• The search box in the main window now answers, not just filters. Ask a plain question and the same fact card that used to live only in the quick search palette now appears above your results in the window too.
• A Stack's totals used to only work in the demo screenshots; a real Stack you built opened to a bare, unsorted list. Now it shows its own real total, or an honest count of how many of its items had a number to add when they didn't all have one.
• The menu bar now shows what Kepter actually saved today, and the last thing it kept, so you can tell it's working rather than just sitting there.
• A review pass caught and fixed several real bugs before they shipped: a failed save could look identical to an empty library and invite a reset that would have wiped it for real; a blocked folder could leak memory over time; sign-in, since removed, would have failed in every release build; the sandboxed build could not open a network connection at all; and the purchase key was being read from a place a double-clicked app never has, which would have shipped billing broken from day one.

0.1.10 AUGUST 12, 2026

• Fixed: plugging in a second display could leave Kepter stranded in the middle of the screen with its edge handle detached from it. Both now recover automatically when your displays change.

0.1.9 AUGUST 9, 2026

• The mint color is now used consistently for the one action that matters most on a screen. It used to be pink in three places that didn't agree with the rest of the app, including the loudest button in the whole reader.

0.1.8 AUGUST 9, 2026

• A more reliable download build, with fewer moving parts behind the scenes.

0.1.7 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed: the Settings window could fail to appear, or get left behind when you switched desktop Spaces. It now opens reliably from anywhere and stays with you across every Space.

0.1.6 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed a launch crash on a freshly set-up Mac. If Kepter never opened for you on a clean machine, this was why. Every release from here on is smoke-tested against a fresh, quarantined install before it ships.

0.1.5 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed: closing the full window didn't always hand you back to the small edge drawer. It does now, every time.

0.1.4 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Kepter now lives as one handle on the edge of your screen. Click it and the drawer slides out; open the full window and the handle steps aside until you close it again, instead of two separate things both trying to be on screen at once.
• Settings opens reliably from anywhere in the app, and Pause now lives there too, not only in the menu bar.
• Space-bar previews now use Kepter's own preview panel, so they behave the way they do in the Finder: tap space to peek, double-click to open fully, space or Esc to close, wherever your keyboard focus happens to be.

Early August 2026

Work in the days before the first numbered build.

• The full window opens and stays open reliably, instead of occasionally failing to appear or closing itself.
• The minimum requirement moved up to macOS 15.
• The separate Private room was retired. Marking something private now happens quietly, right where you're looking, instead of needing its own space to manage.
• Pinning something now shows it in a Pinned section immediately, instead of waiting for the next refresh.

July 2026: building Kepter

Kepter's first weeks. Summarized rather than itemized: this was daily, sometimes hourly, work.

• Kepter began as a cloud backup idea, copying what you saved across three cloud providers so it would survive losing a Mac. That plan was cut. Version 1 became local-only: the cloud code was disconnected, and the app and its copy stopped claiming things were "safe in two places" once that was no longer true.
• The part of Kepter that reads and understands what you save moved on-device: Apple's on-device text recognition and on-device models, instead of a call to a server.
• Find, Stacks, and a way to mark things private were all built: search in plain words, related things grouped into Stacks with their own math, and a way to keep sensitive things out of the ordinary view.
• Every common kind of thing you save gets read properly: PDFs open as real, scrollable documents; images show at full resolution instead of a blurry stand-in; audio and video get on-device transcripts; Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents are kept without breaking their format.
• The app runs sandboxed, asking permission for each folder the way the Finder does, and deleting something in Kepter sends it to the same Trash macOS uses everywhere else. Recoverable, not gone.