QuickMD

Lightning-fast native macOS Markdown viewer

Features • Installation • Usage • Under the Hood • Support

QuickMD needs its Apple Developer membership renewed ($99 a year, due 6 October 2026) to stay on the Mac App Store and keep every release notarized. Chip in on Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi.

Overview

QuickMD is a fast, elegant, fully native Markdown viewer for macOS. Double-click any .md file and instantly see beautifully rendered content. No Electron bloat, no loading screens—just pure native macOS performance.

Perfect for developers, writers, students, and anyone who works with Markdown daily. Think of it as the Preview.app equivalent for Markdown files.

Features

Blazing Fast

Opens in milliseconds—no loading screens
Native SwiftUI + AppKit app—lightweight, zero dependencies
Huge documents (10,000+ lines) open and scroll smoothly, Table of Contents and search jumps land exactly, and QuickMD keeps your place through zoom, theme changes, resizes and auto-reload

Fix It in Place

Source Edit (⌥⌘E) — switch the window to the raw Markdown at the line you are reading, fix it, ⌘S, Esc, and you are back in the rendered view at the same place. Select a word first and it is already selected in the source
Byte-faithful saves — the file keeps its encoding (UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM, UTF-16, Latin-1), line endings, permissions, Finder tags and symlinks; only what you typed changes
Nothing lost, nothing overwritten — closing a tab, a window or the app with unsaved text always asks; if another app changes the file while you edit, QuickMD offers both versions instead of picking one
A real text editor underneath — undo, system find and replace, indentation that follows the line, a light syntax tint from the same parser that renders the document
Limits: files up to 2 MB are edited in place (larger ones open in your editor with ⌘E), the syntax tint covers documents up to about 100 KB, read-only files are not edited, and a file with mixed line endings is saved with its dominant style
Still a viewer first: no WYSIWYG, no split panes

Works with Your Editor

Auto-reload — the document refreshes the moment another app saves it. Turn on auto-save in VS Code, Cursor or Zed, or let an AI agent write the file, and QuickMD is a live preview
Open in External Editor (⌘E) — for longer writing sessions: hands the file to your editor (auto-detected, configurable in Settings). VS Code, BBEdit, TextMate and Nova open at the line you are reading

Complete Markdown Support

Headings (ATX # and setext), bold, italic, strikethrough, horizontal rules
Lists — nested, ordered, task lists (- [ ] / - [x]), definition lists (Term + : definition)
Tables with column alignment (headerless | | | tables too)
Code blocks with lightweight syntax highlighting (keywords, strings, comments, numbers, types) and a copy button
GitHub-flavored alerts — [!NOTE], [!TIP], [!IMPORTANT], [!WARNING], [!CAUTION] as native callouts in GitHub's palette
LaTeX math — display ($$...$$) and inline ( $...$ ) with TeX-quality rendering
Mermaid diagrams — flowcharts, sequence, pie, class diagrams and more; click any diagram or image for a window-filling preview with pinch-to-zoom
Inline SVG — fenced ```svg blocks and .svg image links render natively (no web view), scale with the text and print as vectors
Images — local files, remote URLs, embedded data: images, reference-style ![alt][ref], and HTML <img> tags with width (the logo/screenshot idiom of GitHub READMEs, <p align="center"> wrappers included)
Links (inline, reference-style, autolinks), footnotes ([^id]), nested blockquotes
YAML frontmatter (rendered as a neutral code block)
CommonMark soft breaks; Windows (CRLF) and legacy line endings; UTF-16 and Latin-1 files

Navigation & Search

Zoom the whole document (⌘+ / ⌘- / ⌘0) — per window, everything scales
Find in document (⌘F) with match count and per-word navigation
Word-level highlighting across all block types (text, code, tables, blockquotes)
Table of Contents sidebar (⌘⇧T) — auto-generated from headings
Reading mode (⌘⇧R) — hides both sidebars and the hover buttons and centres the text in a 720 pt column; Esc brings everything back
Select across the whole document — drag through paragraphs, headings, lists, quotes, tables and code (it scrolls for you), Shift-click to extend, ⌘A / ⌘C to copy clean text (tables as tab-separated values, math as LaTeX). Every copy shows how many characters and words were copied; optional auto-copy of selections in Settings → General
Copy entire document (⌘⇧C) or individual sections (hover heading → copy icon)
Export to PDF (⌘⇧E) — vector text (selectable, searchable) with rendered Mermaid diagrams — and Print (⌘P)

Custom Themes & Fonts

7 built-in themes: Auto, Solarized Light/Dark, Dracula, GitHub, Gruvbox Dark, Nord
User themes from disk — drop a JSON file into ~/Library/Application Support/QuickMD/Themes/ (GitHub and Homebrew builds; the Mac App Store build keeps the same folder inside its container, ~/Library/Containers/pl.falami.studio.QuickMD/Data/), or use the Import Theme… button in Settings. Live reload, no restart. See docs/themes/ for the schema and examples.
Custom font families — pick any installed font for body text and another for code in Settings → Fonts (JetBrains Mono for code, a serif for reading…). Applies to the document, print and PDF; size and zoom are unaffected. Themes can set their own with bodyFontFamily / codeFontFamily.
Settings panel (⌘,) with color and font previews
Dark mode follows the system, or pick a fixed theme; theme and fonts persist across restarts

Privacy Focused

No analytics, no tracking
Works completely offline (except for remote images)
Your files stay on your device
Open source—see exactly what the code does

Screenshots


Light Mode (GitHub theme)	Dark Mode (Dracula theme)

GitHub-flavored alerts	Mermaid diagrams, rendered natively

More screenshots

Diagrams in Dark Mode	Theme Picker	Table of Contents

Installation

Homebrew (Recommended)

brew tap b451c/quickmd
brew install --cask quickmd

Direct Download

Download the latest notarized QuickMD-vX.Y.Z.zip from GitHub Releases, unzip, and move QuickMD to Applications.

Mac App Store

The Mac App Store version is unavailable from 6 October 2026 until the Apple Developer membership is renewed. The GitHub and Homebrew versions are the same app and keep receiving updates.

Build from Source

Requires macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later and Xcode 15+. See Development.

Usage

Set as Default Markdown Viewer

Right-click any .md file in Finder
Select Get Info (⌘I)
Under Open with, select QuickMD
Click Change All...

Now all your Markdown files will open instantly with QuickMD!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
`⌘O`	Open file
`⌘W`	Close tab (or window if last tab)
`⌥⌘E`	Edit the Markdown source in place / done editing
`⌘S`	Save (while editing the source)
`⌘E`	Open in External Editor (at the line you are reading, where supported)
`⌘F`	Find in document
`⌘G` / `⇧⌘G`	Next / previous match
`⌘A` / `⌘C`	Select the whole document / copy the selection
`⌘⇧C`	Copy Markdown source
`⌘⇧T`	Toggle Table of Contents
`⌘⇧D`	Toggle Recent Documents sidebar
`⌘⇧R`	Reading mode (distraction-free)
`⌃⇥` / `⌃⇧⇥`	Switch between tabs
`⌘⇧E`	Export to PDF
`⌘P`	Print
`⌘,`	Settings (themes, fonts, external editor)
`⌘+` / `⌘-` / `⌘0`	Zoom in / out / actual size

Under the Hood

Swift 5.9, SwiftUI + AppKit, macOS 13.0+, Apple Silicon and Intel. Zero package dependencies: math rendering is vendored (SwiftMath), Mermaid.js is bundled and runs offline
Its own Markdown parser (block-level, with a YAML frontmatter and reference-link pre-pass) and a single inline scanner shared by parser and renderer
Text is drawn by native NSTextViews hosted in a virtualized NSTableView; row heights are measured exactly, off the main thread, so scrolling and jumps stay exact on documents of any size
A per-document file watcher (DispatchSource) drives auto-reload, including editors that save atomically
One image loader and cache for local, remote and embedded images, on screen and in PDF
Per-block vector PDF export — selectable text, embedded fonts, Mermaid diagrams as images, multi-page pagination
Source Edit writes the file in place (inode, permissions and extended attributes survive) and re-encodes exactly what it decoded; the unsaved-changes guard sits in front of the window's own delegate, so the system's document machinery is untouched
The Mac App Store build runs in the App Sandbox (security-scoped bookmarks for local images); the GitHub and Homebrew build is Developer ID signed and notarized, not sandboxed
688 unit tests; GitHub Actions builds every flavor on each push

Where Things Live

QuickMD/
├── QuickMD/                    # App sources
│   ├── MarkdownBlockParser, MarkdownRenderer, InlineSyntaxScanner   # parsing and inline rendering
│   ├── MarkdownView, Views/VirtualBlockList                         # document window and the virtualized list
│   ├── Views/                                                       # block views, sidebars, settings, hover buttons
│   ├── SourceEdit*, DocumentFile*, EditCloseGuard                   # Source Edit (session, editor, file format, close guard)
│   ├── MarkdownExport, ImageLoader, FileWatchManager, ...           # PDF/print, images, auto-reload
│   ├── SwiftMath/                                                   # vendored math rendering
│   └── Resources/                                                   # bundled Mermaid.js + template
├── QuickMDTests/               # Unit tests
├── docs/themes/                # Custom theme schema + starter themes
└── CHANGELOG.md                # Version history

Development

git clone https://github.com/b451c/quickmd.git
open quickmd/QuickMD/QuickMD.xcodeproj   # then ⌘R

Building for Release

GitHub version (default — donation links, no Tip Jar):

xcodebuild -project QuickMD/QuickMD.xcodeproj -scheme QuickMD -configuration Release archive

Or simply build in Xcode with ⌘B.

App Store version (Tip Jar IAP):

xcodebuild -project QuickMD/QuickMD.xcodeproj -scheme QuickMD -configuration Release \
  OTHER_SWIFT_FLAGS="-DAPPSTORE" archive

The APPSTORE flag enables Tip Jar IAP and disables the GitHub-only update checker.

Running Tests

xcodebuild -project QuickMD/QuickMD.xcodeproj -scheme QuickMD \
  -destination 'platform=macOS' test

CI runs the test suite plus Release builds of both flavors on every push and pull request.

Support

Get Help

Support Development

QuickMD is free and open source. If you find it useful, consider supporting development.

Help bring QuickMD back to the Mac App Store: the Apple Developer Program membership ($99 a year) expires on 6 October 2026. Donations go to renewing it - see the goal on qmd.app.

Roadmap

What has shipped, release by release, is in the CHANGELOG. What comes next is shaped by issues — if something is missing for you, open one.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request. Everyone who has contributed code or a report is credited in the CHANGELOG.

Fork the repository
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
Open a Pull Request

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Privacy

QuickMD respects your privacy. See our Privacy Policy for details.

TL;DR: No data collection, no analytics, no tracking. Everything runs locally on your device.

Built with Swift and SwiftUI. No dependencies, no compromises.

If QuickMD is useful to you, a star helps others find it.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github		.github
Casks		Casks
QuickMD		QuickMD
docs/themes		docs/themes
scripts		scripts
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE		LICENSE
PRIVACY.md		PRIVACY.md
README.md		README.md

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