GoKawiilYou want a good Markdown viewer more than you think you do.
We’re all reading a ton of Markdown. It’s been the lingua franca of software development since long before LLMs. But now agents have led us into a cursed renaissance of TUI tooling, and the reading experience has become intolerable. I’m certain that at least 14% of the agita about AI code is driven by exhaustion over incessantly scrolling terminal Markdown.
There are good TUI Markdown viewers. The Charm folks built glow , which I used & enjoyed. My friend Josh built Markless, which is handsome and bristling with features, most notably a table-of-contents nav. These tools are great. But they’re hamstrung by the terminal itself, which is almost always monospaced and thus fatiguing to read.
There are good graphical UI Markdown editors. On macOS, where I live, there’s Obsidian, Typora, and Bear, my personal daily driver. Native UI Markdown editors are attractive and legible. Good reading experiences. But they’re editors. My editors live in particular virtual desktops, with windows arranged just-so, and it drives me up a fucking wall when I click a random .md file and it messes with my editing environment.
So I took a trip to the App Store, where there are in fact Markdown viewers. They’re fine-ish. None of them were good. All I want is for something sane to happen when I double click a .md file, and the viewers you can grab off the App Store do at first seem sane. It’s only after you live with them for a bit that the problems become apparent. Several of them lack text search. Some have in-app purchases(?!). I settled on one, only to discover a couple days later that it didn’t support copying text into the paste buffer. At that point, I was done.
Suddenly, I realized: a good Markdown viewer was a dumb thing to waste time looking for. It’s 2026. I can just have one extruded for me.
❦
It took several hours to generate a better Markdown viewer than I could find on the App Store, but only about 30 minutes of that was interactive. The rest of it was spent yelling about zoning reform on Facebook while Claude chugged away. Behold, MDV.app:
Now, I’m cheating a little bit with that timeline, because I’d done some preparation weeks before. I recruited an old Macbook to run Claude on. I set up Xcode and git. I got Claude configured, and tracked down some Swift and macOS design skills. But the viewer itself, to a viable state, better than what was on the app store: about 30 minutes.
MDV isn’t the best macOS application ever built. Or even a particularly competent piece of software (although: it might well be the best dedicated macOS Markdown viewer). But it has improved my quality of life immensely.
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