Philosophy

Markdown syntax should always be visible, instead of hidden

There're lots of WYSIWYG Markdown editors, but we have no interest in joining the party, we want to see every keystroke clearly, why.

See: Why MarkEdit for some solutions.

Great products should be accessible

Accessibility is not just something nice to have, it is a crucial part of every excellent product, everyone on the planet has equal right to use a service.

Keep the app dead simple, make settings minimum

We wouldn't be adding lots of features in the future, the app you see right now has almost finished its iteration. You don't have lots of ways to customize the app, and this makes people like us conformable.

Don't do everything, do enough things the correct way

The industry already has way too many unnecessary duplicate efforts, lots of products are doing exactly the same thing again and again, and we hate that. If something can be done better using another app, MarkEdit tries the best to take advantage of it rather than recreate it.

Be a good macOS citizen

MarkEdit is an open-source project, we can publish it outside the Mac App Store, but we won't. We believe the Mac App Store is part of the ecosystem, it ensures a more solid experience for users. If something cannot be done in a sandboxed environment, we will just give up.

Things changed as of Oct 2023, we decided to say goodbye to the Mac App Store, see: #368.

Don't worry about that too much, releases are published to GitHub Releases with notarization enabled, which means it is still from an identified developer, in a sandboxed environment.

The only downside is that you'll need to install updates manually (will be notified), as we don't want to bundle an updater that is much bigger than the app itself. Except for critical bug fixes, we'll reduce the release cadence to monthly.

Use technologies correctly

There's no silver bullet, but there're scenarios. MarkEdit uses WebKit for text editing, SwiftUI for settings, and AppKit for all the rest. Is code always better than storyboards? Is auto layout the goto solution for all situations? The answer is always it depends on the scenario. For example, frames are much better for animations, and storyboards work way better for menu creation.