MarkPeek

A minimal, Typora-style Markdown viewer & editor for Windows.

Clean rendering, zero dependencies, one portable .exe. Built for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 10 (32-bit binary, runs on x86 and x64).

Features

• Typora-like clean design (centered content, GitHub-style typography)
• WYSIWYG editing: press Ctrl+E and edit the rendered document directly — headings, tables and lists are edited in place, exactly as they will look in the preview, then Ctrl+S saves it back to Markdown
• Editing hotkeys (Ctrl+A / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, undo, etc.) are handled natively by the browser engine, so they work in any keyboard layout (RU/EN)
• Unsaved changes are marked with * in the title bar and a save prompt protects you on exit
• CommonMark + GitHub extensions: tables, task lists, strikethrough, footnotes
• UTF-8 / UTF-16LE / UTF-16BE files
• Relative images next to the .md file are resolved automatically
• Drag & drop a file onto the window, or open from the command line: MarkPeek.exe readme.md
• Ctrl+O open, F5 reload, Ctrl+E edit / preview, Ctrl+S save (UTF-8)
• Optional: set MarkPeek as the default viewer for .md files (per-user, no admin) — the file icon comes with it
• Portable: no installer, no runtime dependencies, no registry writes except the optional file association

Screenshot

Download

Grab MarkPeek.exe from the Releases page, or build it yourself (below).

Build

Requires MinGW-W64 i686 (tested with gcc 10.5.0).

build.bat

Or manually:

windres app.rc -O coff -o appres.o
gcc -O2 -c md4c/md4c.c      -o md4c.o
gcc -O2 -c md4c/md4c-html.c -o md4c-html.o
gcc -O2 -c md4c/entity.c    -o entity.o
g++ -O2 -c main.cpp         -o main.o
g++ main.o md4c.o md4c-html.o entity.o appres.o -o MarkPeek.exe \
    -mwindows -static -lole32 -loleaut32 -luuid -lcomctl32 -lshlwapi

build.bat looks for the compiler in C:\PORTABLE\mingw32 and falls back to a mingw32 folder next to the project. The result is dist\MarkPeek.exe — a single portable file.

How it works

• md4c (mity/md4c, MIT) converts Markdown to HTML.
• The HTML is rendered in an embedded Internet Explorer (MSHTML) control — present on every Windows 7/10 system, so the app needs no bundled browser engine.
• Editing is WYSIWYG: the same rendered document is switched to contenteditable, so you edit what you see. On save a small script inside the page serialises the edited DOM back to Markdown (it understands the exact HTML that md4c emits for headings, paragraphs, lists, task lists, tables with alignment, block quotes, code fences, links, images and footnotes).
• A Typora-like theme is applied via embedded CSS (IE9-compatible).

Project layout

MarkPeek/
├── build.bat          build script
├── src/
│   ├── main.cpp       the whole app (Win32)
│   ├── resource.h     icon resource id
│   ├── app.rc         icon + version info
│   └── md4c/          third-party Markdown parser (MIT, vendored)
├── assets/
│   ├── icon.svg       app icon source (hand-drawn vector)
│   ├── icon.png       app icon (rendered from icon.svg)
│   ├── icon.ico       multi-size ICO (16..256 px)
│   └── screenshot.png
└── dist/
    └── MarkPeek.exe   portable build output

License

MIT — see LICENSE. md4c is MIT, see src/md4c/LICENSE.md.