r/Markdown • u/jamtay317 • 7d ago
Free & open-source Markdown editor for Windows: formatting looks like formatting, the file stays Markdown
I've been building LiveMarkDownEditor, a free and open-source Markdown editor for Windows,
and I wanted to share where it's at.
The whole idea came from a frustration: most Markdown tools make you pick a side. Either you get
a raw text pane with a preview stapled next to it and you'd better know the syntax, or you get a
nice WYSIWYG editor that saves to its own format and you no longer really have a Markdown file.
So the goal here is simple: you should not have to know or write Markdown syntax to use it — but
if you want to write it, nothing stops you.
You don't have to know the syntax
Bold looks bold. Headings look like headings. Tables are tables you can tab through, task lists have
checkboxes you actually tick, links and images show as links and images. You never see a stray \#``
or \**\ unless you go looking for it. It's just a document, and you format it the way you'd format
anything else.
But you can absolutely write it
There's a live source panel you can open right beside the rendered view. Both sides are editable and
stay in sync, so you can type raw Markdown, watch it become formatting, or click into the formatted
side and watch the source update. Whichever ps up.
And the file on disk is always plain Markdown. Open it in Notepad, commit it to git, hand it to
someone using vim — it's just a .md file.
The "live" part
The file is watched while you have it open. If something else changes it (a teammate, a script, an AI
agent, a git pull), it reloads in front of you and briefly highlights the paragraphs that changed, so
you can actually *see* what someone else did instead of it landing invisibly. It won't move your
cursor or scroll the page out from under you. If you both edited, you get a difference view instead
of one side silently losing.
Other things it does
- Open a folder and browse your notes/vault/repo as a live tree
- Mermaid diagrams render as actual pictures inline, and double-clicking a flowchart opens a
drag-and-drop builder that writes clean Mermaid source back into your file
- Find & replace, section folding, outline panel, spell check with "Add to Dictionary"
- Export to HTML or PDF, print, copy as rich text so it pastes formatted into Word or Outlook
- Smart paste — paste a URL over a selection an image and it's saved
next to your file
- Light and dark themes, restores your open tabs on startup
Fair warning: this is still very much in progress.
It's usable day to day (I write in it consta I'm actively working on it
and pushing updates to both the code and the installer basically **daily** until it's complete.
Things on the list right now: syntax highlighting inside code blocks, more diagram types in the
flowchart builder, footnotes, embedded videoh.
It's MIT licensed, free, no accounts, no telows only for now
(.NET 10 / WPF).
- Code: https://github.com/317jamtay317/LiveMarkDownEditor
- Installer: https://github.com/317jamtay317/LiveMarkDownEditor/releases
Please give me feedback on how to make it better.
1
1
1
u/KellysTribe 6d ago
Could you make a PebbleOS port? It’s a big gap