Coding agents write a lot of Markdown. Plans, specs, migration notes, summaries, READMEs — files you are supposed to read before approving what happens next, and that in practice scroll past in a terminal and are never opened again.
This plugin opens them. Every .md file Claude Code writes appears in
MacMD Viewer, rendered, in the background, without
taking focus away from your terminal.
/plugin marketplace add macmdviewer/claude-code-plugin
/plugin install macmd-viewer@macmdviewer
/reload-plugins
That is the whole setup. The next file your agent writes opens by itself.
A PostToolUse hook on the Write tool. When the file written is Markdown and
is not machinery — not agent memory, not node_modules, not build output, not a
temp file — it runs:
open -g -b com.arthur.MarkdownViewer "$file"-g is the important flag: the document appears without pulling focus. You keep
typing; the file is there when you look up. MacMD watches the file afterwards, so
later edits by the agent refresh the window instead of stacking new ones.
The script is 40 lines of bash. Read it before you install it — that is a reasonable thing to want from something that runs on every file your agent writes.
Auto-open is on as soon as the plugin is installed.
/macmd off # stop it
/macmd on # bring it back
/macmd status # which is it right now
The switch is a marker file, so you can also manage it from a dotfiles repo:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
~/.claude/.macmd-autoopen exists |
ON |
~/.claude/.macmd-autoopen-off exists |
OFF |
| neither exists | ON — installing the plugin is the opt-in |
The first marker is the convention used by the setup script, so the two agree if you have ever run it.
/macmd # the .md file just written in this session
/macmd docs/plan.md # a specific file, absolute or relative
Unlike the hook, /macmd brings the window to the front — you asked for it.
This plugin covers Claude Code. For Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and JetBrains, the same auto-open behaviour is set up by the script documented at macmdviewer.com/docs/integrations.
macOS, and MacMD Viewer installed. MacMD is a paid app: $19.99 once, no subscription. This plugin is free and MIT-licensed, and it is a no-op without the app — the hook fails silently rather than nagging you, and nothing in it will ever try to sell you anything mid-session.
If you want to see what the app does with a Markdown file before deciding, the
fastest test is to install it and press Space on any .md file in Finder.
Because reading and editing are different jobs. Editors are built for changing a file; you spend your day inside them and they are excellent at it. What they are not built for is the thing that happens twenty times a day now — a file appears somewhere in a repository, you need to read it once, carefully, and decide whether to let the agent continue.
If you already live inside an editor and that workflow suits you, you do not need this. It exists for the case where you do not want to go find the file at all.
MIT. See LICENSE.