Markdown Preview

Markdown Preview is a free, open-source macOS application built by Pluk for reading .md files natively — no Electron, no browser tab, no account required. It is written in Swift 6.0, requires macOS 15 or later, and is distributed as a signed and notarized DMG or via Homebrew Cask. The project has accumulated over 1,400 stars on GitHub since its creation.

What It Is

Markdown Preview is a dedicated Markdown reader for macOS, not an editor. It sits alongside tools like VS Code, Cursor, Zed, or Sublime Text and handles the reading side: rendering documents cleanly, providing a navigable outline, and handing off to your preferred editor when you want to make changes. The core rendering pipeline uses Apple's swift-markdown library (backed by cmark-gfm) inside a WKWebView, giving it GitHub-Flavored Markdown compatibility with heading anchors and link handling.

Core Features

• Native Quick Look extension — pressing Space on any .md file in Finder renders the formatted document inline, without launching the app. Spotlight and Mail attachments use the same renderer.
• Document outline sidebar — every heading becomes a navigable table of contents; the active heading tracks your scroll position.
• Edit Mode — toggle with ⌘E to edit Markdown in place using a formatting toolbar for headings, emphasis, lists, quotes, code, and links; save with ⌘S.
• Mermaid diagrams — fenced mermaid code blocks render as diagrams using a bundled renderer, so previews work offline.
• Math equations — LaTeX inline, display, and fenced math blocks render with a bundled KaTeX; copying a rendered formula yields the original LaTeX source.
• Open With — hands off to VS Code, Cursor, Zed, Sublime, BBEdit, Nova, CotEditor, TextMate, MacVim, Xcode, or TextEdit; the picker filters to apps that declare an editor role for Markdown and remembers your last choice.
• Open in LLM — sends the current file to Codex, Claude, or ChatGPT from the toolbar.
• Command line tools — installs mdp, md-preview, and markdown-preview shell commands from the app menu.
• In-document search — toolbar search field plus standard ⌘F / ⌘G shortcuts.
• Text zoom — trackpad pinch, toolbar controls, or keyboard shortcuts; discrete Safari-style stops from 50% to 300%.

Architecture and Build

The project is structured as an AppKit + WKWebView main app target alongside a Quick Look extension (.appex). Dependencies resolved via Swift Package Manager include Sparkle (auto-update), Sentry (privacy-filtered crash reporting), and swift-markdown. Release builds are automated through Amore, which handles code signing, notarization, DMG creation, S3 upload, and Sparkle appcast publishing. Crash reporting collects no document contents, file paths, user information, or performance traces, and can be disabled from the app menu.

Setup Path

Installation is straightforward via two routes:

• Homebrew: brew install --cask markdown-preview
• DMG: download the latest signed and notarized release from GitHub Releases

No account, no setup wizard, and no network dependency for core rendering — Mermaid and KaTeX are bundled.

Update: v0.0.41

The latest release is Markdown Preview 0.0.41, published on 2026-07-26. The repository shows active development with the last push on 2026-07-26 and 9 open issues. The project homepage claims the app is trusted by teams at 250+ companies (a vendor-published claim), and the GitHub repository lists 1,438 stars and 68 forks as of the data snapshot.