About mrkdwn
mrkdwn is a Markdown editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone that keeps every note as a plain file on your own disk, and builds a knowledge base on top of it. It is made by Buena Labs.
Why it exists
Most note apps want two things from you in return for being useful. They keep your notes in their format, and they keep your attention in their app. mrkdwn asks for neither.
It writes ordinary .md files to a folder you choose, and it stays out of the way until you reach for it. So you get the structure of a knowledge base and the permanence of a text file, and you don't have to pick one.
Your notes are files, not rows
Every note is a .md file in a folder you picked. Finder, git, grep and any editor you switch to later can already read it, and ten years from now they still will, whether or not mrkdwn is installed. There is no account to create and no vault format to export your way out of.
Sync and history are built on top of the files and never take their place. iCloud sync does a three-way merge and marks conflicts instead of quietly keeping the newest copy. Version history keeps 30 days of word-level diffs, and restoring an old version leaves the current draft intact.
A knowledge base with nothing to install
Wiki links resolve as you type. A backlinks panel shows every note that points at the one you have open, and a knowledge graph draws the whole folder, which you can filter by tag or by search. Quick Open finds any note with one shortcut.
The preview renders tables, footnotes, callouts, LaTeX maths and Mermaid, Graphviz and Markmap diagrams, all without a network. Code is highlighted in more than 180 languages. It comes with six themes and takes your own CSS. You can import from 18 formats and export to PDF, EPUB, HTML, RTF, TXT and Markdown.
None of this is a plugin you have to find, install and keep updated. It is all in the app, and all of it except the AI works offline.
Built for the sentence you're writing
Focus mode dims every paragraph except the one you are in, and typewriter scrolling keeps your line centred. Writing goals, streaks and live counts show your progress without a dashboard asking for attention.
When you want to look harder at a draft, prose highlighting colours each part of speech and style check flags adjectives, adverbs and passive voice. It flags them and never rewrites them. The edits stay yours to make.
AI that asks before it writes
/continue, /rewrite and /summarize run at the cursor, and only when you type them. Every change comes as a diff that you accept or throw away, and nothing lands in the document on its own. Authorship tracking marks which passages you typed, pasted or generated, so a year from now you can still tell which sentences you wrote.
You bring your own Claude API key, which is kept in the system Keychain. On a device with Apple Intelligence you can use Apple's on-device model instead. It needs no key and sends nothing anywhere.
One editor, three devices
The Mac, iPad and iPhone apps share one Swift core, and each is built the way its platform expects, not as a web page in a window. One purchase covers all three. There is no subscription and no upgrade tier, and nothing is held back.
Who makes it
Buena Labs is the software studio of BuenaGames, LLC. It is a small team, and mrkdwn is its writing app. The studio also draws Buena Mono, the variable monospace typeface that sets every code block on this site, and gives it away free.
Before this site names a feature, we check it against the app's code. If a feature is described here, it has shipped.
Where it stands
mrkdwn 1.5 is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, released 21 September 2026. It needs iOS or iPadOS 26. The Mac app is built and is still in pre-release testing, so its row says Coming soon rather than sending you to a listing that does not carry it yet.
The web clipper is published for Edge and Chrome. Android and Windows are on the roadmap and have not been built. A native Linux app is not planned. On Linux, the clipper works in any Chromium browser.
Reach us
Write to us, or use the studio site — support, the privacy policy and everything else legal live there, where one copy serves every Buena Labs product.