Acrobat's power,
without the noise.
Folio opens straight to a calm, beautiful reading surface — never edit-mode chrome you have to dismiss. A Rust core renders each page to the GPU, so scrolling, zoom and search stay glass-smooth even on big documents. Read first; everything else is one keystroke away.
A reader that respects the reading.
Everything here ships in the current build — a focused, fast PDF reader.
Opens to reading
No palettes, no toolbars fighting for space. Folio launches to the page, the way a reader should.
GPU-smooth
Pages render to GPU tiles through Metal, so momentum scroll and pinch-zoom stay fluid on big files.
Fast search
Full-text find with highlighted hits and next/previous, plus a jump-anywhere outline sidebar.
Select & copy
Drag-select real text across lines and copy it out cleanly — not a screenshot of the page.
Continuous scroll
A smooth, paginated canvas with a per-page cache — pages float on the desk, not jammed edge to edge.
Light & private
No embedded JavaScript, no phone-home. An untrusted PDF stays a document, not an attack surface.
Read now. Edit, review and sign — as explicit modes, next.
Folio is a reader today. These are built as deliberate modes you invoke, never forced on you — and they're not in the current download yet.
Annotate & review
Highlights, notes and comments as a mode you turn on.
RoadmapEdit & organize
Reorder, merge, split and fill — power without the clutter.
RoadmapSign & redact
Adobe-valid signatures and real redaction, when you need them.
RoadmapGet Folio.
A fast, calm PDF reader for macOS. Free while in beta.
Beta build, not yet notarized — macOS will ask you to approve it once. The reader is the shipped reality today; annotate, edit and sign are on the roadmap above.
⚠ First launch: "Apple could not verify…"? Here's how to open it ›
- Open the .dmg and drag Folio into your Applications folder.
- Double-click Folio. When the "Apple could not verify…" dialog appears, click Done — not "Move to Trash".
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and click Open Anyway next to Folio.
- Confirm with Touch ID or your password. It opens normally every time after that.
Comfortable with Terminal? One command does it all:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Folio.app
This step exists only because the app isn't Apple-notarized yet — it's the same code you see here, just not stamped by Apple's paid notarization service.