MarkdownCafe is a writing app for Markdown that keeps your words in front of you and the machinery out of the way. Open one file or a whole folder of notes, type on the left, and watch the finished page take shape on the right.
Everything happens on your own computer. There is no account to create, nothing to upload, and nothing to import: your notes stay as plain text files exactly where you already keep them, and the app simply opens them.
Highlights
- See the finished page as you type - your text on one side, the formatted document on the other, scrolling together so you never lose your place.
- Your whole notes folder in the sidebar - point the app at a folder and every document inside it is one click away, nested folders and all.
- Find any line in any note - one search box covers every document in the folder and shows you the matching lines, so you can jump straight to the right paragraph.
- Tabs for everything you have open - keep the outline, the draft and the reference note side by side and switch between them with
⌘1or⌘⌥`. - An outline that jumps - every heading becomes a clickable entry, which turns a long document into something you can navigate instead of scroll.
- Focus and typewriter modes - dim everything but the paragraph you are writing, and keep the line you are on parked in the middle of the screen.
- 32 themes, light and dark - from plain paper white to Dracula, Nord and Solarized. Pick the one you can write in for three hours.
- Hand the document to someone else - export a self-contained web page or a PDF that looks exactly like what you were just looking at, theme included.
- Everything Markdown people actually use - tables, checklists, footnotes, quotes, front matter, emoji shortcodes and code blocks that colour themselves.
- Picks up where you left off - your recent files and folders are waiting on the opening screen, and your file is saved back in the same format it arrived in.
How it works
Open the app and you get a short list of what you were last working on. Choose a file to edit it, or choose a folder to load an entire collection of notes into the sidebar. Anything you write is saved back to that same file, so nothing is locked inside the app and you can keep the folder in Dropbox, iCloud, a Git repository or a plain backup drive.
When you want the room to yourself, hide the sidebar and the preview and write in a single clean column. When you need the document finished, export it as a web page or a PDF and send it on.
Perfect for
- Writers and note-takers who want their notes to still be readable files in ten years, not rows in someone's database.
- Developers writing READMEs, changelogs and documentation next to the code, with the preview showing what the page will look like.
- Students and researchers keeping a folder of lecture notes, drafts and citations that they can search in one go.
- Anyone leaving a subscription notes app who wants to open the same notes without a monthly bill or a login screen.
