Hello World

By Jonathan Reed
  • personal
  • updates
Theme
Subscribe

Opening

This is a blog where I’ll most likely post thoughts, updates, things I build, & other random things. Slowly becoming an eclectic mix of things going on in my field & hobbies.

To start things off, I want to just have a slight rant about .md or the lack of basic editors & viewers. The only two that I have found annoying or bloated are Obsidian.md or Raycast notes.

The Problem

But they both have some problems when it comes to making a quick .md note & viewing how it looks.

| Features    | Obsidian.md | Raycast notes |
|-------------|-------------|---------------|
| Viewer      | Yes         | No            |
| Editor      | Yes         | Yes           |
| Lightweight | No          | Yes           |

While I know that Obsidian is light. It still is so much more than just an editor & viewer. This leads to a feeling of too many options when all I need to do is see how a doc looks or change a graph & see how it will render. I love so much about it, but it’s just too much for a simple task.

Raycast Notes is honestly the closest to perfect out there. It’s sleek, ultra-lightweight, & always at your fingertips. The one & only problem is I can’t view it in Markdown. I can edit it, & it has a really nice action panel & option presentation. But I can’t see how it will look in a viewer. (Edit: 8/22/26: Raycast Notes lets you view either the Markdown formatted or Unformatted, but not together like Obsidian in spit-panel.)

Learning & Surprise

This has led me all the way down the rabbit hole into just making a simple markdown editor & viewer app with both in one window. It will do no more & no less. Then what I learned… It was super fucking easy.

To the point I don’t know why it isn’t already an option. TextEdit or Notepad has this? It took whole two or so hours to make while I was also juggling other things like class work & watching a vsauces video.

If anything, this random deep dive gave me much more appreciation for Markdown as a format.

Being able to implement it & design a simple Python app around it so fast was a really nice experience, but left me confused why other basic notetaking software ignores it.

The takeaways I got from this

  1. I genuinely don’t know why there isn’t some easy way to read & view markdown files.

  2. Markdown is wonderful & not just nice to use but easy to implement.

  3. Raycast Notes is still really, really good.

    Also, I do know Raycast Notes displays the Markdown rendered text. I was specifically after a way to see the plain text & Markdown. It’s a niche need but as I discovered really easy to implement.

If you want to check out or add to/fix my project it here on GitHub

Thanks for reading!

Feel free to share this blog or reach out to me on linkedin