Simple Markdown Viewer

About Simple Markdown Viewer

Markdown files are plain text, which is exactly why they outlive every app that made them. Simple Markdown Viewer gives them somewhere good to be read.

Open a .md file and it renders the way it was meant to: proper headings, real tables, syntax-highlighted code, task lists, footnotes and blockquotes, in clean GitHub-style typography. No sign-in, no account, no sync service. It is a small native Windows app that opens instantly and then gets out of the way.

READ

Every Markdown feature you actually use is supported — headings, emphasis, tables, task lists, footnotes, definition lists, strikethrough, keyboard keys, abbreviations and auto-links. Code blocks are syntax-highlighted in the language you wrote them in. A thin progress line at the top of the page tracks how far through a long document you are, and the app remembers your scroll position per file, so reopening a document puts you back where you stopped.

WRITE

Press Ctrl+E and the rendered view becomes a monospace editor with a line-number gutter, word count and spell check. Press Ctrl+2 for split view: source on the left, live preview on the right, updating as you type. Turn on Sync and both panels lock to the same line, so scrolling one scrolls the other. A soft amber halo marks the block in the preview that matches your cursor, so you never lose the connection between what you are typing and what you are seeing.

DIAGRAMS AND MATH

Fenced blocks tagged mermaid render as live diagrams — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, ER diagrams, Gantt charts, pie charts — themed automatically to your light or dark mode. Inline and display LaTeX renders through KaTeX, so $E=mc^2$ and full display equations typeset properly instead of sitting there as raw text.

NAVIGATE

A resizable Table of Contents sidebar is built from your document's headings and highlights the section you are currently reading. Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[ jump between headings without touching the mouse. Ctrl+F searches the rendered page. Obsidian-style [[wikilinks]] jump between local Markdown files, and links pointing at files that do not exist are marked in red so broken references are obvious.

SHARE

Export the rendered document as a PDF in one click with no print dialog, or as a single self-contained HTML file you can send to anyone. Print with a proper print stylesheet. Copy the raw Markdown source to the clipboard, copy the file path, open the file in your usual editor, or reveal it in File Explorer — all from the overflow menu.

FITS HOW YOU WORK

The app follows your Windows light or dark theme and can be overridden with one click. Pick the font used in the rendered preview. Zoom from 75% to 200% with the toolbar or Ctrl+scroll. Pin the window on top while you reference notes in another app. Drag a .md file onto the window to open it, or set Simple Markdown Viewer as your default handler and open files straight from File Explorer. Recent files are one click away, and the app reopens at the size and position you left it.

Edit a file in another editor while it is open here and the view reloads automatically, keeping your place — a live preview for whatever tool you actually write in.

OFFLINE BY DESIGN

Syntax highlighting, diagram rendering and math typesetting all ship inside the app. Your documents are read from disk and rendered on your machine. There is no account to create, no telemetry, and no cloud service between you and your own files.

Built with WinUI 3 for Windows 10 and Windows 11, on x64, x86 and ARM64.