QuickMD
Lightning-fast native macOS Markdown viewer
Features • Installation • Usage • Under the Hood • Support
QuickMD is free. Donations help renew the qmd.app domain - 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
- Reload (
⌘R) — re-read the file on demand, for the rare change auto-reload misses (network volumes, unusual save strategies)
- 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; #heading links jump within the document, using GitHub's heading ids
- YAML front matter as a table of its fields (title, tags, dates); anything more complex stays a 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; set the size every document opens at in Settings → Fonts
- 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; right-click it to list every level or stop at H2, H3 or H4
- Reading mode (
⌘⇧R) — hides both sidebars and the hover buttons and centres the text in a comfortable column (720 pt at 100 %, growing with zoom); Esc brings everything back
- Select across the whole document — drag through paragraphs, headings, lists, quotes, code and tables (a word, a cell or a range of cells), it scrolls for you, Shift-click to extend,
⌘A / ⌘C to copy clean text (table cells 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. 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 and the optional Check for Updates)
- Your files stay on your device
- Open source—see exactly what the code does
Screenshots
Installation
Homebrew (Recommended)
brew install --cask b451c/quickmd/quickmd
Installed earlier with brew tap and brew upgrade now reports an "untrusted tap" (Homebrew 7)? Run brew upgrade --cask b451c/quickmd/quickmd once.
Direct Download
Download the latest notarized QuickMD-vX.Y.Z.zip from GitHub Releases, unzip, and move QuickMD to Applications.
Mac App Store
Get QuickMD on the Mac App Store. It is the same app as the GitHub and Homebrew versions; App Store updates arrive after Apple's review.
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) |
⌘R | Reload the document from disk |
⌥⌘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 / back to the default 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
- 800+ 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.
Donations help renew the qmd.app domain - see the goal on qmd.app.
Roadmap
What has shipped, release by release, is in the CHANGELOG. What is planned for the next version is listed in this issue: comment there, or open a new issue if something is missing for you.
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.
