MarkDown4W — a Markdown reader I built for myself

I needed something simple: to open a Markdown file — the kind of lightweight text people use for notes or documentation — and read it properly. When I went looking for a Mac app that did just that, I found it wasn't simple at all.

The tools I tried tended toward two extremes. Some charged just to look at a piece of text. Others were free but built around editing and configuration, with the one thing I wanted — reading — buried among the buttons. After a while, I decided to build my own. That became MarkDown4W.

A small thing, done properly

I have no illusion that this is something everyone needs. Markdown is mostly a developer's tool, and developers are used to reading far more complicated things; viewing a document cleanly is hardly a pressing need. But I've made software long enough to know that most tools bloat out of a fear of missing something, not because anyone asked — and I still wanted the feeling of opening a file and seeing it appear clearly and smoothly, in the spirit of a proper macOS app. Just text, arranged to be read.

Most of the work was saying no

The hardest part of building MarkDown4W wasn't adding features; it was removing them. I had meant to allow editing, or syncing, or exporting to PDF — but each one dragged in settings, and none of them made the reading any better, so they were left out. Every idea had to pass a simple question: without it, is the reading any worse? The answer was usually no. What remains is the small set that survived many rounds of consideration.

The result is a single principle: open a file and you're reading — no setup, no tutorial, no onboarding.

A few adjustments, where they matter

Even so, everyone reads in different conditions, so a few things are worth opening up. You can change the tone to suit your eyes and your surroundings: a soft light, warm cream paper, or a dark one for late hours. Text size and typeface adjust too. The rule here is still enough to be comfortable, no more — each option that made it in is one I judged worth keeping.

When you need to find a passage in a long document, ⌘F marks every match and counts them. Open several files at once and they sit in tabs, like pages in a browser.

The app also handles the more involved cases — a block of code, a formula, a diagram — and renders all of it on your own machine. Your documents never leave it: the rendering runs entirely offline, held behind a strict security policy that blocks every outbound connection — even remote images embedded in a file won't load. And because it's open source, you can check for yourself. To me that is a basic expectation of a document reader, not a feature to highlight.

An idea kept for later

I did once consider a feature that erases a document after you've read it, the way it happens in spy films. But since I haven't found a way to do it without damaging the reader's device, I've set the idea aside for another time.

Download

MarkDown4W is a native macOS app, open source and free. No account, no trial. If you, too, simply want to open a Markdown file and read it in quiet, it was built for exactly that. Grab the ready-to-run build, or read the source, at github.com/nsongha/MarkDown4W — and if you find something missing too, the repo is open.