alt Hacker NewsThis essay could have been a prompt. I have a markdown viewer. Comes out of the same codebase as my json viewer https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-30/Personal_Sof...
I felt the same but if you put it into Claude code Opus 5.5 can build you a program that will open faster than anything you’ve ever used before if you ask for it. I asked for it and it’s instantaneous. Faster than literally any other macOS app.
It opens and displays a markdown file faster than bitwarden’s chrome extension displays its fill UI.
The future is almost here. Formats and so on are on the threshold of irrelevance in the next few years for this kind of consumer use. It’s hard to even tell if the time it takes us to summarize a text will be the time a future agent takes to write a specialized program that extracts what you need from the file. “Native” support will soon be irrelevant.
Even my solution is yesterday’s solution.
Replies
> This essay could have been a prompt.
Doesn't look like this to me.
The main point of the essay is that MD files should be supported on an OS level. This way, you could share an MD file with anybody, and it will “just work”.
You could develop your own viewer, but this will not solve the problem of “just working” for every user. Because most users wouldn't install some app just to open the file you shared with them. The same way you don't expect users to install any software to open websites, images or PDFs.
You completely missed the point.
The OP is arguing that something should work by default without any configuration needed, and you're talking about building a bespoke tool.
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While yes, your solution easily works it is not what the author is aiming for. If I send you a PDF you have a multitude of options on your phone already preinstalled that can open and view the PDF. Any browser does the trick at this point, easy 100% coverage across all devices. But if I send you a .md file a browser does not show the rendered content but the raw markdown which is not the expected behaviour. Markdown is so simple there is really no excuse for it to be so complicated to open what is basically just a fancy text-file. It is 2026, it should "just work", no AI needed.