Markdusk

A Mac-native markdown editor. Tauri shell, Rust core, Svelte UI, CodeMirror 6 editor. Free, no account, no cloud, no plugins.

Built because the default .md experience on macOS is TextEdit showing raw asterisks, and the alternatives are either paid (Bear, iA Writer, Typora) or ask you to adopt a knowledge-management religion (Obsidian). Markdusk just opens the file.

What it does

• Soft WYSIWYG. Markdown markers hide on inactive lines, stay visible on the line your cursor is on.
• Tabs with autosave per file.
• Workspace sidebar + click-to-jump outline.
• Command palette (⌘⇧P) and quick file switcher (⌘P) with fuzzy search.
• Jump to heading (⌘⇧G).
• Recent files that survive restart, plus tab-session restore on launch.
• Focus mode (⌘⇧F) with iA-style paragraph dim and typewriter scroll.
• Smart punctuation — curly quotes, en/em-dashes, ellipsis. Off by default.
• Bracket auto-pair and smart list continuation.
• Find & Replace with regex.
• Spell-check toggle.
• Vim mode toggle.
• Themes — Smoke (sage) and Amber (paper), each with light/dark/system appearance.
• Inline KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams in the editing buffer.
• Syntax highlighting for ~25 languages in fenced code blocks.
• Export to HTML, PDF (via WebView print), and DOCX (via pandoc sidecar). Copy as Rich Text for paste-into-Slack/Mail.
• Image paste saves alongside the doc and inserts a relative reference.
• Sticky heading while scrolling through long docs.
• Line numbers toggle.

What it isn't

It's not Obsidian. There's no graph view, no plugin marketplace, no backlinks, no daily-notes ritual, no canvas. It's not a knowledge base. It's not a publishing CMS. It's not real-time collaborative. It's not cross-platform yet (Mac-only on purpose). It's not AI-first — no inline ghost-text completions.

See docs/personas.md for who it's for and docs/roadmap.md for what's next.

Install

Releases will land on Homebrew when the build pipeline is signed and notarized. Until then, build from source:

git clone https://github.com/Chartres/markdusk.git
cd markdusk
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build
# bundle ends up in target/release/bundle/macos/Markdusk.app

Requires Node 20+, pnpm, Rust 1.90+, Xcode Command Line Tools. macOS 12+.

DOCX export requires pandoc on PATH:

brew install pandoc

Status

Pre-release. The owner is using it as his default .md editor and shipping fixes as friction shows up. The roadmap (docs/roadmap.md) tracks what's shipped vs. what's queued — currently most of M1, M2, and parts of M3.

If you try it and something breaks, file an issue with the file that broke it and a screenshot.

Stack

• Tauri 2 shell — Rust binary, WebKit WebView, native menus.
• Svelte 5 with runes for the UI layer.
• CodeMirror 6 editor with custom soft-WYSIWYG decorations.
• pulldown-cmark for markdown parsing in the Rust core.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.