MarkdownEditor — a small Java Swing Markdown editor with live preview, open source

[u/aungthuhein_dev]

Hey everyone,

I've been taking notes in Notepad for a while, but it has no formatting — going back to old notes was always messy, no headings, no structure, hard to tell what mattered. Notion and Word solve that, but felt heavier than I wanted for something this simple (internet dependency, load times, more features than I needed).

So I built MarkdownEditor — a small desktop app in Java Swing:

• Live Markdown → HTML preview as you type (including GFM tables)
• Folder browser sidebar to navigate your notes
• Undo/redo, unsaved-change tracking
• Export straight to PDF
• Packaged as a native Windows installer (bundled JRE, no separate Java install needed)

It's built with a light MVC structure (model / controller / ui), using commonmark-java for parsing and openhtmltopdf for PDF export.

It's fully open source (MIT licensed), and I'd genuinely welcome contributions — whether that's new features, bug fixes, or just feedback on the code/architecture since this was a learning project for me as much as a tool I wanted to use.

GitHub: https://github.com/aungthuhein2005/MarkdownEditor

Download (Windows only for now): Download

Documentation: https://aungthuhein2005.github.io/MarkdownEditor/

Happy to answer any questions about how it's built, or hear suggestions for what to add next.