Show Me the Markdown

By Jonathan Reed
Read 3 min

I built a tiny markdown viewer because macOS still will not preview a .md file properly, and it was easier to make than it should have been.

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Opening

macOS gave me TextEdit, which rendered my .md file like a ransom note.

I just wanted to preview it.

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 and 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 is still much more than just an editor and viewer. It gives me too many options when all I need to do is see how a doc looks or change a graph and see how it will render. I love a lot about it, but it’s too much for a simple task.

Raycast Notes is honestly the closest to perfect out there. It’s sleek, ultra-lightweight, and always at your fingertips. The one and only problem is I can’t view it in Markdown. I can edit it, and it has a really nice action panel and 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 split-pane.)

Learning and Surprise

So I built one: a simple markdown editor and viewer with both in one window. It does no more and no less. Then I learned something annoying: it was super fucking easy.

Two hours. I don’t know why this isn’t already a system option. TextEdit or Notepad should have this. It took about two hours while I was also juggling class work and watching a Vsauce video.

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

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 and 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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