The Markdown Viewer
for Everyone

A beautiful, free desktop app for viewing Markdown files.
Like Acrobat Reader, but for Markdown.

Available for macOS Windows
MarkView application showing rendered Markdown

Simple. Beautiful. Free.

Everything you need to read Markdown files, nothing you don't.

Clean Typography

GitHub-style rendering with beautiful, readable fonts. Tables, code blocks, and lists look exactly as intended.

Dark & Light Themes

Automatic system theme detection, or choose your preferred mode. Easy on the eyes, day or night.

Drag & Drop

Just drop a .md file onto the window. Or use File, Open. Or double-click any Markdown file.

Zoom Controls

Adjust text size with keyboard shortcuts (Cmd/Ctrl +/-) for comfortable reading at any distance.

Lightning Fast

Native desktop performance. Starts instantly, uses minimal memory, never slows you down.

Privacy First

Your files never leave your computer. No uploads, no cloud, no accounts required.

Download MarkView

Free for macOS and Windows. No account required.

Why MarkView?

Markdown is everywhere now. But sharing it with normal people? That's still a mess.

If you use AI coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code, your specs and documentation end up as .md files. Even regular ChatGPT users run into this—click that copy button and paste into a text file, and you've got Markdown whether you meant to or not. The format is everywhere now.

The problem comes when you need to share these documents. Send someone a .md file today, and they'll open it in Notepad. Headings look strange. Formatting codes are confusing. And tables? Completely unreadable—a grid of pipes and dashes that makes no sense to anyone.

There are tools that render Markdown beautifully, but none fit the everyday use case:

  • Typora is excellent—but it's paid software. You can't expect friends or colleagues to buy an app just to read a document.
  • VS Code, Obsidian, Notion—these are power tools for power users. Way too heavy for "just open this file."
  • Online viewers require uploading your files to some website. Privacy nightmare.

There was no "Acrobat Reader for Markdown"—a simple, free, native app that anyone can install and use in seconds.

MarkView fills that gap.

It's a viewer, not an editor. Minimal, not bloated. Free, not paywalled. Built for normal humans, not developers. Designed to make AI-generated documents actually shareable.

About the Author

Doug Kerwin is a VP of Engineering and serial builder who's worked across the technology spectrum, from bootstrapping startups to leading teams at a Fortune 500 company. He brings hands-on technical experience and a leadership perspective to AI-first development, having spent hundreds of hours working directly with these tools to build real production systems.

He is the author of The Enterprise Vibe Coding Playbook: How Real Teams Build Real Software With AI and Riley & Bot, a children's book about AI and the future of work.

Doug believes Markdown is becoming the document format of the future—driven by AI tools that generate it by default—and that everyone deserves a simple way to read it.

Support MarkView

MarkView is free and always will be. If you find it useful, consider buying me a coffee to help cover development and hosting costs.

Buy me a coffee