A standalone macOS markdown viewer with live file reload. Opens a .md file, renders it, and re-renders automatically on every save.
Fork of sbarex/QLMarkdown, trimmed down from a Quick Look extension into a plain app.
Grab the latest signed and notarized build from the Releases page:
unzip MarkdownViewer-vX.Y.Z.zip
mv MarkdownViewer.app /Applications/That's it — no Gatekeeper warning, no xattr ritual. Double-click any .md file in Finder, or open -a MarkdownViewer file.md from the terminal.
- Finder: double-click or right-click → Open With
- Terminal:
open -a MarkdownViewer file.md - Drag-and-drop onto the window
Required if you're hacking on it. Needs Xcode 26 and cmake for the bundled cmark-gfm. Clone with --recurse-submodules so the renderer dependencies come along.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nmelo/MarkdownViewer
cd MarkdownViewer
xcodebuild -project MarkdownViewer.xcodeproj \
-scheme MarkdownViewer \
-configuration Release \
CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="-" CODE_SIGN_STYLE=Manual \
ONLY_ACTIVE_ARCH=YES buildThe product lands in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/MarkdownViewer-*/Build/Products/Release/MarkdownViewer.app. Drop it in /Applications, then codesign --force --sign - --deep it for local launch.
GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.
The Swift code in this repository started as a derivative of sbarex/QLMarkdown (MIT), which the MIT license allows us to relicense. The combined work is GPL-3.0 because the syntax-highlighting library it links against (saalen/highlight) is GPL-3.0.