Windows · macOS · v0.1
MarkPad is a small desktop Markdown editor that opens your file, renders it, and gets out of the way. Plain text in, plain text out. No account, no vault, no sync, and no browser tab quietly eating a gigabyte in the background.
Windows 10 and later, macOS 13 and later. Not sure which Mac you have? Apple menu, then About This Mac. Anything from 2020 on is almost certainly Apple silicon.
Nothing is signed, so the first launch needs one extra step: on macOS right-click the app and choose Open, on Windows click More info then Run anyway.
::: blocks :::
- Everything reachable from Ctrl/⌘K — no menu hunting
- Read the [spec](./spec.md) before filing anything
| Platform | Shell | Installer |
|----------|-------|-----------|
| Windows 10+ | WebView2 | 3.3 MB |
| macOS 13+ | WKWebView | 3.6 MB |
> Your files are files. Delete MarkPad tomorrow and nothing breaks.
| Platform | Shell | Installer |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 10+ | WebView2 | 3.3 MB |
| macOS 13+ | WKWebView | 3.6 MB |
That is the whole installer, on either platform. It uses the WebView already sitting on your machine instead of shipping a second copy of Chromium.
Traffic lights on macOS, caption buttons on Windows. It snaps, minimises and alt-tabs the way everything else on your desktop does.
Ordinary Markdown on your own disk. No database, no proprietary syntax, nothing to export if you walk away.
Everything below ships in v0.1. Anything not listed is deliberately absent.
Files open rendered, and you type straight into the rendered surface. The raw source is one command away when you need to see it.
Ctrl/⌘+K reaches every command. Menus are the second way to do things, never the only way.
A 26px rail of heading ticks down the left edge. You get the shape of the document without surrendering a sidebar to it.
Several files open at once, drag and drop to open, and the set you had last time is waiting when you reopen the app.
Tables, LaTeX and Mermaid diagrams render in a popover where the cursor is. A full preview pane exists, and ships switched off.
Through the system print engine, in the box. No Pandoc, no LaTeX distribution, nothing extra to install.
CRLF and LF are detected on open and preserved on save, with the current setting visible in the status bar. Same for a UTF-8 BOM.
Light and dark, switching when your system does. Diagrams and code blocks follow along instead of staying stubbornly white.
These are checked on every commit and they fail the build. If a change breaks one, the change is wrong, not the budget.
| Budget | Limit |
|---|---|
| Installer size, per platform | under 8 MB |
| Cold start to first keystroke | under 400 ms |
| Opening a 10 MB Markdown file | under 1 s |
| Typing latency in a 5 MB file | same as an empty file |
| Network requests while running | one, the update check |
Not a gap in the roadmap. These are refused on purpose, because each one is a step on the road from a text editor to something you have to manage.
It is a few megabytes and your files are plain text. If it turns out not to be for you, uninstalling costs you nothing.
Free and MIT licensed. Built with Tauri and CodeMirror.