Features

A tour of everything Cook Editor does, organised by what you're trying to get done.

Writing `.cook` files

The text editor understands Cooklang natively. Syntax highlighting colours ingredients, cookware, and timers differently from prose. Inline validation flags malformed quantities (@flour{200grams}) and unmatched braces before you hit save. Autocomplete suggests ingredients and cookware you've used in other recipes, so your collection stays consistent over time.

Metadata lives in YAML frontmatter at the top of the file — servings, time, tags, anything you want. The preview and shopping list read from that block.

Cooklang source with syntax highlighting next to the rendered recipe preview

Preview & scaling

The preview pane renders a .cook file as a clean recipe card — numbered steps, ingredient chips, timers, cookware pulled into their own sections. Toggle it with the split-pane icon in the top right.

The Scale field in the preview scales every quantity in the recipe, including anything you've written with fractions (1/2) or mixed units. The original file is not modified — scaling lives in the preview.

Recipe preview with photo, scale control, plugin badges for allergens, diet, macros and Nutri-Score, and the ingredient list

The badges next to Scale come from optional plugins: allergens, Core Vitals, diet, macros, Nutri-Score and pantry match.

Shopping lists

Click the cart button in a recipe or menu preview (or right-click the file in the explorer and choose Add to Shopping List or Add Menu to Shopping List) and open the list from the cart icon on the right. Cook Editor merges the ingredient lists, combines duplicates (@flour{200%g} + @flour{150%g} becomes 350 g), and groups the result by aisle — produce, dairy, pantry, and so on. The shopping list is a plugin that comes with Cook Editor; see the Shopping List guide.

The list is reactive: tick an item to cross it out, add or remove recipes and the list updates. Via the Cook.md sync, the same list appears on the mobile apps, so you can cook together and still share one list.

Shopping list built from three recipes, grouped by aisle, with two items ticked off

`.menu` meal plans

A .menu file is a list of recipes arranged across days and meal slots. Cook Editor renders it as a week view, generates a combined shopping list for the whole plan, and scales everything at once when you change the household size.

Menus are also just text files: they live next to your recipes, diff cleanly in git, and open in any editor.

A .menu meal plan rendered as day cards with recipe links and loose ingredients

CookBot AI sidebarCook Pro

CookBot is an AI assistant that lives in a sidebar inside Cook Editor. Ask it a question and it can pull in specific recipes or menus from your collection to answer in context ("what's planned for this week?"), import recipes from any URL into a clean .cook file, and draft new recipes or meal plans.

CookBot sidebar after drafting a three-day breakfast plan from the Breakfast folder, with the new .menu file open in the preview

CookBot saves its changes — a new file, an edited recipe, a menu — straight to your folder and lists each one in the chat under Changes made. Open a file there to see the diff, Undo to put it back, or Undo All to roll back the whole conversation.

CookBot is included with a Cook Pro subscription. Without a subscription, the rest of Cook Editor still works as a full editor and preview — CookBot is a Pro-only sidebar.

See the CookBot help section and prompt library →

CookBot data & privacy

CookBot is built on a frontier AI model from a third-party provider. Here's exactly what happens when you ask it something.

Your files stay on your disk. Cook Editor reads from and writes to your local folder. We don't upload your collection.
Only the file content you reference is sent. When CookBot needs to look at a recipe or menu to answer your question, it includes that file's contents in the request — not your whole collection.
We don't store conversations on our servers. Your messages and the file content they reference are forwarded to the AI provider for processing; the reply comes back to your editor. Cook MD doesn't persist the conversation contents.
The AI provider doesn't train on API data. Per the provider's commercial terms, content sent through their API is not used to train their models.
Every write can be undone. Each file CookBot changes is listed in the chat with its diff and an Undo.

Cook Editor is open source, so the exact prompts and tool calls are auditable. If you spot a privacy concern, file an issue on GitHub.

Keyboard shortcuts

Cook Editor is built on the Theia IDE framework, so if you've used VS Code the shortcuts are familiar.

Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P — open the command palette (every action is here).
Cmd/Ctrl + P — quick-open a file by name.
Cmd/Ctrl + S — save.
Cmd/Ctrl + B — toggle the sidebar.
Cmd/Ctrl + \ — split the editor.
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + V — open the recipe or menu preview (Cook-specific).

The command palette is the fastest way to find an action you don't remember the shortcut for — start typing and it filters in real time.