Opening
All I wanted was to preview a .md file.
macOS gave me TextEdit, which rendered it like a ransom note.
The only two markdown tools I’ve found that aren’t annoying or bloated are Obsidian.md and Raycast notes.
The Problem
Both stumble at the same job: write a quick .md note, then see how it renders.
| Features | Obsidian.md | Raycast notes |
| ----------- | ----------- | ------------- |
| Viewer | Yes | No |
| Editor | Yes | Yes |
| Lightweight | No | Yes |Obsidian is light for what it does, but it is still more than an editor and viewer. It gives me too many options when all I need is to see how a doc looks or change a graph and check the render. I like Obsidian. It is too much for this job.
Raycast Notes is honestly the closest to perfect out there. It’s sleek, ultra-lightweight, and always at your fingertips. The one and only problem is I can’t view it in Markdown. I can edit it, and it has a really nice action panel and clean options. But I can’t see how it will look in a viewer. (Edit: 8/22/26: Raycast Notes lets you view Markdown as formatted or unformatted text, but not together like Obsidian in split-pane.)
Learning and Surprise
So I built one: a simple markdown editor and viewer with both in one window. It does no more and no less. Then I learned something annoying: it was super fucking easy.
Two hours. That is what it took, while I was also juggling class work and watching a Vsauce video. I don’t know why this isn’t already a system option. TextEdit or Notepad should have this.
If anything, this random deep dive gave me more appreciation for Markdown as a format.
The takeaways I got from this
Markdown is wonderful because it is readable, portable, and easy to implement. Raycast Notes is still really, really good. It still will not show a split-pane preview as of August ‘26, and I am still annoyed.
If a CS freshman can build a viewer in two hours, why can’t Apple? Laziness or malice. I’m too tired to decide which.
The project is here if you want to try it, break it, or make it less annoying: GitHub: Simple-md