Opening
I just wanted to preview a .md file. That’s it. macOS gave me TextEdit, which rendered it like a ransom note.
The only two markdown tools I’ve found that aren’t 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
If a CS freshman can build a viewer in two hours, why can’t Apple? This is either laziness or malice, and I’m too tired to decide which.
Markdown is wonderful & not just nice to use but easy to implement. Raycast Notes is still really, really good—but it still won’t show split-pane as of August ‘26, and I’m still annoyed.
If you want to check out or add to/fix my project it here on GitHub
Thanks for reading!
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