Marque

Overview

I kept running into the same small annoyance: I had markdown files I wanted to read, not edit, just read, and nothing on my machine would render them properly. Preview doesn't know what markdown is. VS Code can technically render it, but opening an entire editor to read a document felt rather absurd. Every dedicated markdown app I found either wanted a subscription or came with a writing environment I had no use for. So I built one.

The Challenge

The problem was genuinely simple, which is part of why it was so irritating that nothing solved it well. I wanted to double-click a .md file and have it open, formatted, readable, done. No editor chrome, no folder sidebar, no sync features. Just the content, rendered nicely. Everything available was either too much app or too little formatting.

Approach

I kept the scope deliberately small. One window, one file, clean rendering. A light and dark mode because I would want that myself. An Open File button because sometimes you browse for things. That is more or less it. The temptation to add features was real (tabs, a file browser, export options) but the whole point was that this thing should do one job and then get out of the way. If I ever catch myself adding a preferences panel, something has gone wrong.

Results

• •Free, open source, and does exactly one thing
• •Opens .md files and renders them cleanly
• •No subscriptions, no accounts, no sync, no bloat