Show HN: Marky – A lightweight Markdown viewer for agentic coding
Hey HN, In this age of agentic coding I've found myself spending a lot of time reviewing markdown files. Whether it's plans or documentation that I've asked my agent to generate for me, it seems that I spend more time reading markdown than code. I've tried a few different solutions to make it easier to read such as Obsidian however I've found their Vault system to be quite limiting for this use case and I've found TUI solutions to not quite be as friendly to read as I've wanted so I made Marky. Marky is a lightweight desktop application that makes it incredibly easy to read and track your markdown files. It also has a helpful cli so you can just run marky FILENAME and have the app open to the md file that you pointed it at. I've been using the daily over the past week and I really enjoy it so I figured I'd share it. Here's a video if you want to check out a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGBxt8uOVjc . I have plans to add more features such as incorporating agentic tools such as claude code and codex into the UI as well as developing a local git diff reviewer to allow me to do local code review before pushing up to git. I'd love to hear your thoughts and any feature suggestions you may have :)
Discussion Highlights (15 comments)
desireco42
Definitely appreciate this. I already have Typora which is commercial but fantastic product so I don't really need another viewer but others for sure will. Glad you used Tauri to make this. I will check it out.
_andrei_
ha, nice - had the same need, i leveraged fumadocs for the ui part https://github.com/3rd/mdreader
FailMore
I like the folder opening and the idea to integrate Claude is very interesting. I’m also curious to know how you did the document rendering. It looks very good. This problem has risen to the top of many people’s minds at this moment (including mine!). My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution ( https://sdocs.dev ) is on the /show page now ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633 ). My approach is a little different. I think Markdown might end up being a core document type in the future of work, so I tried to blend Markdown with “Office”-like functionality, such as complex styling and in-browser editing. Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`): https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)... The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F ...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client"). The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment. This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the (quite long!) url. Also, I’m sorry I high jacked your post to some degree with this comment. It’s just a little too relevant for me not to leave a comment! I use mine daily too. A solid Markdown renderer definitely makes agentic coding a lot more pleasurable.
yakkomajuri
I did something very similar recently, just made it open source but haven't posted anywhere. https://github.com/yakkomajuri/seams Run `seams .` in any dir and get a rich markdown editor with image uploads, block editing, tables, etc etc Congrats on launching!
mschulkind
Seems like I'm just part of the club here, but I've also been working on something similar recently. https://vantageapp.dev/ I find connecting understanding between humans and agents is one of the most important parts of the agentic development cycle, and markdown is a great way to handle that. Not only can you point it at an entire directory, you can point it at multiple projects, quick load a project with a keyboard shortcut, and also easily see recent file that changed to help you find the 75th file your agent just wrote for you. Recently, I've started to add a review interface where you can track changes, and add comments for your agent, and then instead of trying to do some complicated integration with an agent, it just has a copy button, and it copies all the comments, which context, and instructions for the agent how to reply. I also find that I generate TONS of markdown junk during development, and I needed a way to handle it and keep it out of the main repository so I built this tool: https://github.com/mschulkind-oss/swarf/
msluyter
Somewhat related. I've also been generating lots of markdown files, which I've occasionally wanted to print out (so I can rest my eyes, or just read them somewhere other than my desk.) First class (free) printing support for rendered markdown seems like a lacuna in the overall ecosystem. I'm currently using the "print" plugin for VS Code, which opens rendered markdown in a browser window, which I print from there. Curious if anyone knows of better options?
hbbio
Congrats on shipping! Been also building this slowly, mostly assisting my kids. What they built is Apple-only, since it's a native iOS/macOS app in Swift. It's been a very interesting experience for me, as even capable frontier LLMs still can't write Apple SwiftUI/AppKit properly. They constantly get the bridges wrong, and any feature prompt puts your previous architectural efforts at risk :)
robinduckett
I built a similar thing today for my hyprland desktop! https://github.com/robinduckett/hyprmark
FergusArgyll
Like many others here, I made this for myself too, but! mine is also named marky!
cetinsert
https://zerodevx.github.io/zero-md/ is the real deal. No react bs.
alsetmusic
First thing that blocks me from adopting it is lack of ability to adjust text size. I increase default text size on web pages and in my terminal. I'm old enough to need that. I can see the text at the default size but it strains my vision and is uncomfortable. Also, needs to be able to resize the columns / sidebars. I like the initial design. Hope you keep adding to it.
zmmmmm
seems like vscode + preview is nearly the same? I guess my key issue is, with files getting continuously modified by coding agents, I want really good integration with git and live update features. If the file just got edited, make it easy to see the new parts etc.
dhruv3006
Interesting this goes well with https://voiden.md/ - maybe we can integrate this - great work man!
gknapp
What does this do that Obsidian doesn't already do? I've found that's my typical go to for pairing with Agentic work, and supports Markdown well, alongside tons of other functionality.
hresvelgr
> A fast, native markdown viewer for macOS built with Tauri v2, React, and markdown-it. Since when is JavaScript native? Tauri may be using the system's web view but it's still a web view. False advertising.