alt Hacker NewsExcept there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then?
Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked. But that's all I could find. Otherwise you have to load MD files in some kind of editor and "preview" them. NO! I just want to double-click on the file and READ it, with the formatting applied. Why is that so hard?
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There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that.
Try copying some markdown into these places:
- A reddit comment
- Microsoft Teams
- Slack
- Discord
- Google Docs
- Discord
- Notion
- Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think)
Etc.
Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/).
Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.
I'm personally a huge fan of Typora. It's available on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
> that render them as intended
Markdown is the intended rendering medium.
> And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked.
I like MacDown [1]. Someone recently forked it to MacDown 3000 [2].
Obsidian is on Mac too. And it has live preview of md.
`glow` is a pretty handy terminal mardown viewer.
Plenty of browser extensions exist, from barebones to fancy which support several flavors, include Mermaid and MathML, etc.
Try Obsidian. Its "LiveView" editor mode is fantastic.
A lot of the responses to your comment imo are kinda missing your point. I don't use Apple products, but I do understand what you're saying. You want an editor that also has an option for previewing the markup text in its formatted view.
It's officially only available for Linux (the Windows version is currently under development), and like I said, I don't use Apple products, and idk how familiar you are with manually compiling source code or how good Wine is on Macs, but maybe [Remarkable](https://remarkableapp.github.io/) could be an option?
Just thought I'd give my $2.70. ;)
> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers
Huh? Any open-source project on GitHub, at least, has the viewer right there. It's the default view of markdown files. I assume other repos are similar.
E.g. The readme https://github.com/jquery/jquery
> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended.
Huh? If you find a markdown file in a project on Github, I have every confidence that it renders as intended in Github's markdown viewer.
That is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext
This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.