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A local-first Markdown editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone

mrkdwn guide · Based on mrkdwn 1.5 ·

Most note apps are two things at once: a place to write, and a place your writing is kept. mrkdwn keeps those apart on purpose. The keeping is done by your file system — ordinary .md files in an ordinary folder — and the app is what you use to write in it. This guide walks through what that means day to day.

Start with the folder

A mrkdwn library is a folder. Each note is one Markdown file inside it, and subfolders are just subfolders. Keep the library in iCloud Drive and it appears as a folder named mrkdwn that you can open in Finder or the Files app like any other. If you already keep Markdown somewhere, point mrkdwn at that folder instead and edit the files where they are.

Because the notes are files, everything you already know how to do with files still works. You can back them up with Time Machine, search them with grep, keep them in git, or open one in another editor. None of that goes through mrkdwn, and none of it needs mrkdwn installed.

mrkdwn also leaves alone what it does not own. If another tool writes frontmatter into a note, it survives a round trip through the app exactly as it was.

Write in plain Markdown, and see it styled as you go

The editor is native on each platform, built from one Swift core rather than a web page in a window. Markdown syntax is highlighted as you type: headings, emphasis, links, tables and code blocks all look like what they are while staying the characters you typed.

⌘B and ⌘I cover bold and italic, and the Format menu covers the rest. Beyond standard Markdown you get highlights, superscript and subscript, footnotes, callouts and a table of contents. Spell check understands Markdown, so it skips code, URLs and frontmatter.

Choose how much of the screen is writing

There are three view modes. Writer is the source alone. Split puts the source and the rendered preview side by side, scrolling together. Reader is the preview alone. Zen is a modifier you can add to any of them with ⌘D: the sidebar steps aside and the column widens to the text.

A few settings shape the page itself:

  • Focus mode fades every paragraph except the one you are in.
  • Typewriter scrolling keeps your current line centred, however long the document runs.
  • Editor width is a measure in characters, not a fraction of the window, so lines stay a readable length when you maximise.
  • Live counts show words, characters, sentences, and reading and speaking time, and writing goals track a daily target and your streak.

Let the preview do the heavy lifting

The preview renders GitHub Flavored Markdown (tables, task lists, footnotes, strikethrough and autolinks) and adds what plain Markdown leaves out:

  • LaTeX maths, inline and in blocks, rendered by default.
  • Mermaid, Graphviz, Chart.js and Markmap diagrams, drawn from ordinary fenced code blocks.
  • Syntax highlighting for more than 180 languages.
  • NOTE, TIP and WARNING callouts from blockquote syntax.

All of it renders offline, so nothing in the preview waits on a network. There are six built-in themes, and you can add your own CSS and code themes.

Get things in, and get them out

mrkdwn imports 18 formats, including PDF, PowerPoint and Excel, and it can read text out of images. The web clipper, for Chrome and Edge, saves a selection or a whole page as Markdown straight into a folder on your disk.

Going the other way, mrkdwn exports to PDF, EPUB, HTML, RTF, plain text and Markdown on every platform, and to Word and OpenDocument on the Mac. ⌥⌘C copies rendered HTML. But the most important export is the one you never have to run: the notes are already .md files, so leaving means copying a folder.

What you do not have to do

There is no account to create and no sign-in. Everything except the AI works with the network off. Deleted notes go to a trash you can recover from, and version history keeps a 30-day timeline of every note with word-level diffs.

The AI features only run when you ask for them. They get a guide of their own.

Where to go next

mrkdwn is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. The Mac app is still in pre-release testing. See where each platform stands.