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Comment by VerifiedReports | Hacker News Reader

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then?

Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked. But that's all I could find. Otherwise you have to load MD files in some kind of editor and "preview" them. NO! I just want to double-click on the file and READ it, with the formatting applied. Why is that so hard?

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There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that.

Try copying some markdown into these places:

- A reddit comment

- Microsoft Teams

- Slack

- Whatsapp

- Discord

- Google Docs

- Discord

- Notion

- Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think)

Etc.

And Obsidian! Best of them all.

Matrix, Discourse. I wish that Signal supported it though.

I love Signal, but this is one thing I wish it did better. It's much easier to write Markdown than long-press and format.

Most repo browser UIs, and apps like VSCode, too.

Again, the point is not to launch an EDITOR and then open up a "preview." The point is to double-click and start reading the document as formatted. You know... like we can do with even the maligned PDF.

Think about the word "preview." If you're "previewing" the Markdown file, what are you previewing its appearance in?

And BBEdit

Still an editor, not a reader. The point is not to have to launch an editor and then "preview" a file you're just trying to read.

Most MD readers I’ve seen show an editor and preview side by side.

Hahaha, I know, right? Someone might seriously float this argument.

Gee, here's a Markdown file on my computer that I'd like to read (formatted as intended). Since I don't have a lightweight reader for Markdown, let me just...

1. Open it up in a text editor

2. Launch a browser

3. Navigate to some page that allows Markdown comments.

4. Log in to comment.

5. Find something to comment on.

6. Create and paste into a comment.

7. Post the comment.

8. Read.

SO EASY!

Seems like a lot of steps when you could just double click the file.

If you're on Windows it'll open in notepad.exe which is a markdown viewer.

On most flavors of Linux it'll open in a markdown viewer.

That leaves Apple and Android which I don't think have built in markdown viewers. But you can just install an app.

That is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext

This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.

It's NOT nice-looking plain text. It's text littered with a bunch of formatting characters that aren't respected by any lightweight viewer. So why have them in there?

I'm not proposing to make it a better markup language. I just want to VIEW it with the formatting that it calls for.

It's mystifying that people are actually opposed to this. It's like a massive psychology-class experiment, when a bunch of confederates champion an obviously-absurd point of view to see if the subject of the experiment will hold his ground.

Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/).

Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.

Thanks. That's a start, I guess!

I'm personally a huge fan of Typora. It's available on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Typora is the best markdown authoring experience out there, even surpassing obsidian imho. I wish I could use it every time I interact with markdown.

Never heard of Typora before, but after looking it up it is an instant buy for me. Thanks for sharing!

> that render them as intended

Markdown is the intended rendering medium.

Haha, right.

Obsidian is on Mac too. And it has live preview of md.

https://obsidian.md/download

`glow` is a pretty handy terminal mardown viewer.

Plenty of browser extensions exist, from barebones to fancy which support several flavors, include Mermaid and MathML, etc.

> And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked.

I like MacDown [1]. Someone recently forked it to MacDown 3000 [2].

[1] https://macdown.uranusjr.com

[2] https://macdown.app

> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended.

Huh? If you find a markdown file in a project on Github, I have every confidence that it renders as intended in Github's markdown viewer.

Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?

And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.

You might have difficulty doing that without using a browser, given that markdown renders to HTML.

Try Obsidian. Its "LiveView" editor mode is fantastic.

Thanks. I don't want to launch an editor and then invoke a preview. I just want to double-click and read the damned file, formatted as intended. It's mystifying that people don't recognize the pointlessness of a markup format that's almost never rendered as the markup dictates.

You're welcome.

Respectfully, you've made some invalid assumptions. Even if your only use case is reading extant markdown, using Obsidian as your viewer probably still makes sense. Trivial, one-time config to open .md files in Read mode, and one-time system config to associate .md files with Obsidian, and voila: "double-click and read the damned file".

That said, if you were then to spend even a little time in Obsidian doing things other than reading, your "mystification" about "pointlessness" would vanish. Markdown is flexible and portable, eminently readable by machines and people (whether viewed raw or rendered), and Obsidian is an incredibly powerful tool for leveraging its capabilities.

A lot of the responses to your comment imo are kinda missing your point. I don't use Apple products, but I do understand what you're saying. You want an editor that also has an option for previewing the markup text in its formatted view.

It's officially only available for Linux (the Windows version is currently under development), and like I said, I don't use Apple products, and idk how familiar you are with manually compiling source code or how good Wine is on Macs, but maybe [Remarkable](https://remarkableapp.github.io/) could be an option?

Just thought I'd give my $2.70. ;)

> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers

Huh? Any open-source project on GitHub, at least, has the viewer right there. It's the default view of markdown files. I assume other repos are similar.

E.g. The readme https://github.com/jquery/jquery

Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?

You said almost no viewers. I'm pointing out that the GitHub website has a built-in viewer.

If you're looking at the code locally, what editor do you use that doesn't have a markdown viewer? I use Sublime with MarkdownLivePreview. Although honestly I generally don't, because md is so easy to read without a viewer.

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