
GetMD
Typora
iA Writer
MacDown
Bear
Markdown by DaringFireball
Caret
FocusWriter
Marked
Typora
SuperNotecard
Linked Ideas
vym
Freeplane
Pencil Project
Visual Understanding Environment
GetMD's answer
Independent software developers Open source contributors Technical writers and documentation teams
GetMD's answer
MDViewer is a pure Markdown viewer, not an editor. While most Markdown apps focus on writing, MDViewer focuses on reading. It's built with native SwiftUI — no Electron, no web views for the UI — which means instant launch, minimal RAM usage, and native macOS feel. It also has built-in Git history browsing, so you can see how a Markdown file changed over time without leaving the app.
GetMD's answer
It's native and lightweight. Typora costs $15 and is built on Electron. Marked 2 costs $14 and hasn't been updated in a while. MDViewer launches in under 100ms, uses ~30MB of RAM, and supports Mermaid diagrams out of the box. Core features are free — viewing, Mermaid, Git history, tabs. If you need to read .md files — not edit them — MDViewer does that one job better than any editor can.
GetMD's answer
Software developers and technical writers on Mac who work with Markdown daily — reading README files, documentation, changelogs, API docs, and AI-generated output from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or GitHub Copilot. Also useful for anyone who receives .md files and just needs to read them without installing a full editor.
GetMD's answer
I kept opening Markdown files in VS Code just to read them — a full code editor for a 2-second task. Every "Markdown app" on Mac was really an editor, not a viewer. So I built what I actually needed: a fast, native viewer that opens .md files like Preview.app opens PDFs. No editing toolbar, no distraction — just rendered Markdown.
GetMD's answer
Swift, SwiftUI, and Apple's native frameworks. Markdown rendering uses a custom pipeline. Mermaid diagrams are rendered via an embedded engine. The app is fully native Apple Silicon — universal binary, no Electron, no bundled Chromium.
Based on our record, Marked seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 26 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
I came here to recommend Marked: https://marked2app.com But...I like MDV. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
> This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian, To be honest, other than both of them allowing you to write markdown, they're not comparable. Obsidian is the current favorite of the "make a second brain" crowd which is based the concept of a Zettelkasten [1]. There are thousands of plugins to customize Obsidian to turn it into whatever you want. It just... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
I’ve not used it for very large documents, but I’ve been very happy with the fidelity of conversion using Marked 2 (https://marked2app.com) I believe it’s Mac only. I use it sometimes when I’m creating PDFs from my personal documentation to share more publicly, which I keep in Markdown and deploy on Gitlab Pages as a static site. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
I write a LOT of documentation in Markdown for $DAYJOB. I normally use Marked2 (not free, but I paid for my license 7-8 years ago) or MacDown (free) to preview them, and to export them to PDF. Both of these programs are specific to macOS, but a web search for "markdown editor" turns up a few dozen others, for other platforms. Most of these will have an "export to PDF" function built into them. Source: almost 3 years ago
Marked 2 https://marked2app.com/ is a dedicated viewer for Markdown and other text formats, but it's Mac only. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
Typora - A minimal Markdown reading & writing app.
iA Writer - Minimal Design, Maximum Focus
SuperNotecard - Introducing SuperNotecard. SuperNotecard is an online writing tool that features virtual notecards to help arrange facts or scenes, track details, organize paragraphs, and clarify your composition process.
MacDown - MacDown is an open source Markdown editor for OS X, released under the MIT License.
Linked Ideas - A macOS/iOS apps to treat ideas as links of concepts.
Bear - Bear.app is a note-taking and content writing app that helps you boost productivity with its intuitive tools.