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.

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 servings control 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.

Shopping lists

Select one or more recipes in the sidebar and open the Shopping panel. Cook Editor merges their 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 list is reactive: tick an item to cross it out, add or remove recipes from the selection 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.

.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.

CookBot AI sidebarCookbot Pro

CookBot is an AI assistant that lives in a sidebar inside Cook Editor. It can read your whole collection and answer questions in context ("what's in the fridge menu for this week?"), import recipes from any URL into a clean .cook file, and draft new recipes or meal plans.

Every change CookBot wants to make — creating a file, editing a recipe, writing a menu — is shown as a diff first. Nothing lands on disk without your approval.

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

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.