Why I built Markdown Better View

Reading the pile of Markdown that AI tools produce — without opening a heavy editor.

I'm Martin, a solo developer. Over the last year my AI tools — Claude, Cursor, Copilot, ChatGPT — started handing me a lot of Markdown. Answers, design docs, plans, release notes, whole folders of .md in a repo. Most of it I just wanted to read, rendered, not edit.

My options on a Mac weren't great. Open the file in an editor and stare at raw syntax or a half-rendered pane. Or set up a free Quick Look plugin that needs Terminal commands to install and re-enable after every macOS update. Neither felt like "press a key, read the doc." So I built the thing I wanted: a read-only viewer.

Why a viewer, not another editor

Typora and Obsidian already edit Markdown well. The gap I kept hitting was a fast read path: a rendered preview in Finder, a window that follows a file as it changes, and no editing chrome in the way. Scope-creeping into a full editor is the quickest way to make a tool worse at the one thing I actually needed.

The parts I lean on

  • Quick Look in Finder. Press Space on any .md and read it rendered — same themes, KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams as the app — plus real thumbnails instead of generic file icons. No Terminal setup.
  • Follow Edits. The window watches the file, live-reloads on save, and auto-scrolls the preview to whatever changed last. When an AI tool is writing a long document, you watch it fill in instead of re-scrolling a raw buffer by hand.
  • Read a whole folder. Point it at a repo's docs and every .md opens as a native tab. Five themes with a real dark mode, a table of contents, instant find, a distraction-free reading mode.

Shipping it solo

It's native macOS (AppKit + WebKit), not a web app in a wrapper. It's sandboxed, has no tracking and no accounts, and a content rule blocks remote network access — your documents never leave your Mac. I made it a one-time $9.99 rather than add ads or a subscription: one purchase, no account, no recurring bill. macOS 15+, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel.

Who it's not for

It's a reader, on purpose. If you need a full editor, a WYSIWYG writing environment, or a knowledge graph, Typora and Obsidian are the right tools and I'd point you there. I built this for the specific moment of "I have a .md open and I just want it to look right, fast" — which, with AI tools producing Markdown all day, turns out to be most of my day.

Markdown Better View on the Mac App Store — one-time $9.99, macOS 15+. Or read more at markdownbetterview.com.

Written June 2026 by Martin Bednář, maker of Markdown Better View.