Every blog needs a first post, and this one gets the easy job: explain what Markdown Writer is, what we think it should be, and what it can already do.

What Markdown Writer should be

Markdown is the closest thing writing has to plain text with superpowers. It’s readable raw, it renders anywhere, and it never locks you into a format. The editors built around it, though, tend to fall into two camps: bloated apps that want to be your whole life, or bare textareas that make you squint at asterisks.

We want the middle. Markdown Writer should be:

Instant. Open the page, start typing. No signup wall, no onboarding tour, no “create a workspace” step.
Local-first. Your documents live in your browser. Nothing leaves your device unless you deliberately publish it.
Faithful. What you see in the preview is what you get in the export, whether that’s a PDF, a Word document, or a shared link.
Free where it counts. The editor is free with no limits. Paid features exist for things that cost us money to run, like sync and hosting, not for things that should have been included in the first place.

What it does today

A real editor with a live preview

The editor and the preview sit side by side and stay locked to the same block as you scroll. Under the hood it supports GitHub Flavored Markdown plus the extensions people actually use: tables, task lists, autolinks, footnotes, and alert callouts.

Math renders in place with KaTeX, so $E = m c^{2}$ inline or full display blocks just work. Mermaid diagrams render too, which means a flowchart is a fenced code block away:

flowchart LR
  Write --> Preview --> Publish

Code blocks get syntax highlighting for more than 30 languages, and each grammar loads only when you need it.

Frontmatter and wiki links

Documents can open with a YAML frontmatter block for a title, date, tags, or anything else you keep in your notes. Obsidian-style [[wiki links]] connect documents to each other, and if you rename a document, every link pointing at it is rewritten so nothing silently breaks.

Export to whatever the other side needs

One click gives you a print-ready PDF that matches the preview. You can also export to DOCX, HTML, plain text, LaTeX, and BBCode. The same converters power the free tools on the site, so you can go the other way too: turn a PDF or an HTML page back into markdown, or generate a markdown table from CSV or JSON.

Works offline

Once the page has loaded, the whole thing runs on your device. Close the tab, lose your connection, come back tomorrow. Your work is still there.

What Pro adds

Signing in and upgrading to Pro unlocks the parts that need a server:

Sync across every device. Every document stays up to date on every browser you’re signed into.
Image hosting. Drop an image into a document and we host it, with a media library you can pull from in any doc.
One-click publishing. Turn a document into a clean, read-only page on our domain that you can send to anyone. Publish a whole collection and it becomes a small site with its own navigation.
AI writing actions. Fix grammar, condense, expand, restructure, or rewrite a selection in a different tone without leaving the editor.

Publishing is always a deliberate action behind the Publish button. Published pages aren’t indexed by search engines unless you opt in, and you can unpublish at any time.

Who it’s for

We built Markdown Writer for ourselves first, and we suspect a lot of people have the same shape of problem:

Developers writing READMEs, changelogs, and design docs who want a preview that matches GitHub.
Writers and bloggers who draft in markdown and need a clean export to hand off to an editor or a CMS.
Students and researchers taking notes with math, diagrams, and citations that need to survive being copied elsewhere.
Teams who want a doc they can share with a link but keep out of the search index.
Anyone who has ever lost a draft to a text field that didn’t save.

What’s next

This post was written in Markdown Writer and published straight from the editor. That’s how this blog will work: the editor gets a Blog collection, and publishing a document there makes it a post. If it’s good enough for our own writing, it’s good enough for yours.

Native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac are in the works, built on the same sync layer as the web app. We’ll write about those here when they’re ready.

Until then, open the editor and start typing. That’s the whole pitch.