Marka

A lightweight Markdown viewer for macOS, launched from the terminal. Includes a QuickLook extension for previewing Markdown files in Finder.

Features

• GitHub-Flavoured Markdown rendering (tables, task lists, strikethrough, code blocks)
• Syntax highlighting for code blocks
• Live reload on file changes
• Dark mode support (follows system appearance)
• Stdin support for piping
• QuickLook extension for .md, .textbundle, and .textpack files
• Find in page, zoom, narrow layout, copy as rich text
• Keep window on top
• Open in Tabs mode (View menu) — new files open as tabs instead of separate windows
• Smart window focus — opening an already-open file focuses the existing window

Install

brew tap muchbetteradventures/tap
brew install marka

Usage

# View a file (with live reload)
marka README.md

# Pipe from stdin
cat notes.md | marka
echo "# Hello" | marka

QuickLook: press Space on any .md file in Finder to preview it.

Build

Requires macOS 14+ and Swift 6.0.

swift build -c release
# Binary at .build/release/marka

Architecture

The main app uses a WKWebView with GitHub-flavoured CSS and highlight.js for syntax highlighting. The QuickLook extension uses native rendering via MarkdownView (since WKWebView is not available in QL extensions).

Acknowledgements

• MarkdownView by Lakr233, native markdown rendering for the QuickLook extension
• Litext by Lakr233, rich text rendering library
• Highlightr by raspu, syntax highlighting via highlight.js
• swift-cmark (cmark-gfm), GFM-compliant markdown parsing
• apple/swift-markdown, Swift markdown parsing
• SwiftMath by mgriebling, LaTeX math rendering

License

MIT