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 |Obsidian is light for what it does, but it is still more than an editor and viewer. It gives me too many options when all I need is to see how a doc looks or change a graph and check the render. I like Obsidian. It is too much for this job.
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 clean options. But I can’t see how it will look in a viewer. (Edit: 8/22/26: Raycast Notes lets you view Markdown as formatted or unformatted text, 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 because it is readable, portable, and easy to implement. Raycast Notes is still really, really good. It still will not show a split-pane preview as of August ‘26, and I am still annoyed.
The project is here if you want to try it, break it, or make it less annoying: GitHub: Simple-md