GitHub - skanga/mdedit: A fast, private, cross-platform Markdown editor built with Tauri, featuring live preview (with split-screen), multi-tabs, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math, native file handling, and offline exports.

MDedit is a fast, private, cross-platform Markdown editor built with Tauri. It combines a focused source editor and live preview with native file handling, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math, and offline exports. Your documents stay local.

Dark Mode Screenshot

Light Mode Screenshot

Features

• A tabbed workspace with independent editing state for every open document.
• Synchronized Edit, Split, and Preview modes.
• GitHub-flavored Markdown, task lists, tables, footnotes, and callouts.
• Syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, and KaTeX math.
• Formatting shortcuts, automatic list continuation, and editor font, indentation, wrapping, and line-number preferences.
• Per-document find and replace with match-case, whole-word, and regular-expression modes.
• Desktop image and attachment import, external-change comparison, and tab context menus.
• Table of contents, reader controls, and light/dark themes.
• HTML, PNG, PDF, CSV, and SVG exports.
• Draft restoration and Markdown file associations.
• Desktop Recent menu remembers the last 20 files you opened or saved.

Working with documents

Select + to create a new tab, or select Open to choose one or several files. Select a tab to make it active; the editor, preview, view mode, selection, scroll position, find state, exports, and Save commands follow the active document. You can also switch tabs with Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

In the desktop app, select Recent in the toolbar to reopen a file or return to its existing tab. Each entry shows its folder. Use × to remove an entry or Clear recent documents to clear the history; neither action deletes files or changes open tabs. History stays on your device, separately from session recovery. Untitled documents enter the list only after they are saved.

An unsaved change shows a dirty indicator on that document's tab and an asterisk in the window title. Save writes the active document, while Save As writes it to a new location. Save All writes every dirty document in tab order without closing MDedit. Save All & Quit in the close-application prompt performs the same ordered saves, then closes the application. Both commands ask for a destination for each untitled document and stop if a save is canceled or fails, leaving the remaining documents open and unchanged.

MDedit stores local recovery snapshots as you work and restores the tab order, active document, content, and per-document workspace state after an unexpected shutdown. When the file on disk has an external change, the conflict dialog offers Reload Disk Version, Keep Editing, and Save Editor Version As. A deleted source remains open and can be saved to a new location.

On Windows, desktop settings, WebView data, session recovery, and recent-file history are stored under %LOCALAPPDATA%\com.skanga.mdedit. To fully reset the app, close MDedit and delete the Local AppData folder; this removes unsaved recovery copies but leaves documents saved elsewhere untouched.

Closing the application always asks for confirmation. With clean documents, choose Close or Cancel. With dirty documents, choose Save All & Quit, Quit and Restore Next Time, Discard All & Quit, or Cancel. The restore choice checkpoints the whole session locally before closing; discard permanently removes the pending recovered edits.

Desktop exports use raw bytes and Tauri's native save dialog. The save dialog dynamically grants write access only to the selected destination; MDedit has no wildcard filesystem scope. Document saves and private recovery storage remain behind validated Rust commands.

Editing and attachments

Use the compact toolbar above the source editor for headings, bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, links, images, tables, code, horizontal rules, and equations. More formatting appears only when the pane is narrow, collecting secondary actions. The toolbar appears in Edit and Split modes. Use Editor → Show formatting toolbar to hide or restore it; this preference persists locally. On desktop, Image opens the existing image/attachment importer; in the browser it inserts a Markdown image placeholder.

Use Editor for preferences. Font size, tab width, wrapping, and line numbers apply to every tab and persist locally. Enter continues bullets, numbered lists, and unchecked tasks; Enter on an empty list item ends the list. Shift+Enter inserts a plain newline. Formatting, indentation, list continuation, and replacement support Undo.

Find searches only the active document. Match case, Whole word, and Regex stay with that tab's query. Regex replacements support $1, $2, named groups ($<name>), $& for the match, and $$ for a literal dollar sign. Invalid expressions show an error and disable replacement.

On desktop, Attach, image paste, or dropping an image or other attachment copies it into an assets folder beside the Markdown document and inserts a relative link. Untitled documents prompt for Save As first. Each imported asset gets a unique filename, and files are limited to 20 MiB each. Relative images resolve from the document folder, including ../ references. HTML exports embed local images and attachments; PNG and PDF include local images. Remote images retain the existing export limitations. Keep the Markdown file and its relative assets together when moving or copying a document to another folder.

Filesystem-aware desktop saving

On Windows, saves inspect filesystem capabilities and preserve Windows security permissions on ACL-capable filesystems. Errors identify the failing operation instead of reporting every security failure as temporary-file creation. The editor never falls back to directly overwriting or deleting an existing document.

For an existing file on WSL or another filesystem without Windows ACLs, saving asks Use compatibility saving? Choose Use Compatibility Saving to write a flushed temporary file and rename it over the original. Cancel is the default and leaves the original unchanged. Permission preservation remains enabled on ACL-capable filesystems.

Compatibility tradeoff: the temporary uses folder-default permissions. The replacement may change Linux permissions, ownership, or access ACLs, potentially making the temporary or saved file readable by more people. By default, approval applies only to that resolved path for the current application session; restarting MDedit clears it, and saving over another path requires separate approval.

For a persistent app-wide choice, open Editor → Allow compatibility saving on desktop. It is off by default and shows the permission warning before enabling. Once enabled, it skips per-file confirmations for eligible files and is remembered in the app's local profile across restarts. Turning it off clears session approvals and restores prompts. It does not weaken ACL-preserving saves on supported filesystems or bypass disk conflicts and genuine permission errors. See the validation and CI guide.

External changes and tab actions

The desktop app checks named files every three seconds while visible and when the window regains focus. A clean document reloads when its disk contents change. Unsaved edits remain intact, with Compare changes showing the editor and disk versions side by side. Choose Keep editing, Save As…, or Reload from disk…; discarding unsaved edits requires confirmation. A missing file remains open so its contents can be saved elsewhere.

Right-click a document tab, or focus it and press Shift+F10, for Copy file path, Show in file manager, Save As…, Close tab, and Reopen closed tab. Reopen remembers up to 20 closed saved files during the current session, reads their current disk contents, and restores their workspace state. Discarded untitled drafts are not retained in this list.

Keyboard shortcuts

On macOS, use Command instead of Ctrl for the shortcuts below, except tab switching. Tab switching always uses Ctrl.

Download

Download the latest stable build from GitHub Releases.

These are unsigned builds, so your operating system may show a warning.

Windows installers

For most Windows users, choose the NSIS installer: MDedit_<version>_x64-setup.exe. For managed or administrator-led deployment, use the MSI installer: MDedit_<version>_x64_en-US.msi. Either installer registers Markdown file associations.

For a portable option, download and run MDedit-portable-x64.exe directly. It requires no installation, shortcuts, or file associations, but it does require the system Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime. If WebView2 is missing or needs repair, use the NSIS installer to install or repair it. Portable preferences and restored drafts may still use the normal Windows app-data location. The NSIS installer is still recommended for most Windows users.

Development

Install Node.js LTS, Python 3, Rust/Cargo, and the official Tauri prerequisites. On Windows, also install Bash through Git Bash.

npm ci
npm test

# Build the desktop frontend and run MDedit in development.
npm run build:desktop
npm run tauri -- dev

# Create desktop bundles.
npm run tauri -- build

# Create a Windows NSIS installer.
npm run tauri -- build --bundles nsis

Pull requests run the unit, Rust, desktop-build, and Linux Chromium browser gates. The 250 MB browser benchmark and native recovery-write diagnostic run only for version tags or an explicit workflow dispatch; see the performance evidence guide.

Project structure

index.html and index-lite.html are generated internals used as Tauri assets. Modify src/index.template.html and run bash ./build.sh; do not hand-edit generated files.

Privacy

MDedit has no account, telemetry, document upload, or server-side rendering. Documents remain local. Remote transmission of documents is out of scope.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/skanga/mdedit. Before opening a change, run:

npm test
npm run build:desktop
cargo fmt --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml -- --check
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml

When changing frontend source, commit the generated artifacts as well.

License

MDedit is licensed under MIT. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and licenses/ for third-party notices and licenses.