Mac Markdown apps, sorted by the job they do

Almost every roundup of Mac Markdown apps ranks tools that were built for different jobs, which is how people end up creating a vault to read a README. This one groups them by job first: reading files you did not write, writing documents you did, and keeping a library of linked notes. Sizes are measured, not copied.

Reading Markdown other people wrote

The distinguishing feature here is a Quick Look extension: press Space on a .md file in Finder and see the document rather than the syntax. Almost nothing has one, which is why this category is short.

QLMarkdown is the long-standing free option and renders through a web view, with a deep settings panel if you like configuring things. Marked is a preview-and-export companion for people who write in another editor, and its App Store listing states in capitals that it is not an editor; Finder previews mean buying Marked QL separately. MarkEdit's own extension shows syntax-highlighted source; its free MarkEdit-preview extension, installed from inside the app, adds a rendered preview.

Longer comparisons: QLMarkdown, Marked, MarkEdit.

Writing documents in Markdown

These are editors. The good ones hide the syntax while you type and get out of the way, and what separates them is export, theming, and how much of the machine they take up.

Typora is the paid default at $14.99 once, and its own docs confirm it has no Quick Look plugin. Lettera arrived in June 2026 from the people who make Bear, still in beta with no announced price. MiaoYan is the one most people have not heard of: native Swift, 9.8 MB, with LaTeX, Mermaid, and a presentation mode. The original MacDown is the one to move off: Homebrew disabled its cask on 1 September 2026. The maintained MacDown 3000 fork has a cask of its own, macdown-3000.

Longer comparisons: Typora, MarkText, MacDown, MarkEdit.

Keeping a library of linked notes

These build an index over a folder so that backlinks, search, and a graph have something to work on. That index is the product, which is why these apps are built around a folder rather than a single file. Obsidian 1.14 added a command for opening a file from outside the vault.

FSNotes is the outlier worth knowing about: it is native, 16.1 MB, and works over an ordinary folder of Markdown files, so it gives you most of the vault idea without Electron. Notion sits at the far end, where your text lives in someone else's database and Markdown is only an import and export format.

If the vault model is what is bothering you, see the Obsidian comparison or opening a Markdown file without a vault.

Every size on one page

Sizes get quoted wrongly more than anything else in this niche, usually because a number gets copied from a listicle that copied it from another one. These were measured the same day from the actual download.

Picking one

If you mostly read Markdown that arrives from elsewhere, take something with a Quick Look extension and stop there. If you write long documents and hand them to people in other formats, buy Typora or watch Lettera. If you want open source and nothing else matters, MarkEdit is 3.2 MB and very well kept. If you are building a second brain, Obsidian, and none of the reading tools will substitute for it.

Glance is in the first group. It previews in Finder on Space, opens a single loose file with no vault, draws LaTeX and Mermaid natively, searches with ⌘F, prints, exports PDF, and lets you fix a wrong line by clicking it and typing. ⌘\ shows the raw Markdown beside the page when you want it. Reading is free; editing is $9.99 once after 14 days.

What it does not do: backlinks, graphs, plugins, sync, themes, or export to anything but PDF. It needs macOS 14 on an Apple Silicon Mac. If those are dealbreakers, one of the apps above is the better answer, and this page is here partly to say so.