macOS has a reader for almost every file you own. Open a PDF and Preview handles it. Open an image and Preview handles it. Open a .md file and you get TextEdit showing raw text — asterisks, pound signs, pipe characters — even though AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT now generate Markdown by default, and those files pile up on disk faster than anything else you own.
MacMD Viewer is the app that should have shipped with the system. Press Space on any .md file in Finder and it renders instantly in Quick Look, without launching anything. Double-click to open it properly and you get live reload when the file changes on disk, Mermaid diagram rendering, syntax highlighting, a document outline for long files, and native tabs so a whole folder of notes stays in one window. Twelve document themes, light and dark. Everything works offline.
It is read-only on purpose. This is not another Markdown editor competing with the one you already like — you keep Cursor, VS Code or Obsidian for writing, and this handles the read side. That decision is what makes it fast: there is no editing state to manage, no sync, no account to create.
Built natively in SwiftUI as a universal binary, notarized by Apple. About half of the people who buy it are not developers — they are writers, researchers and founders who ended up with Markdown files because an AI tool produced them, and who just want to read the result properly.
$19.99 one-time. No subscription, no trial, no free tier, and a 14-day refund policy.
