Manual

Making MarkEdit the Default

As a sandboxed app, MarkEdit cannot set itself as the default app for opening Markdown files, here's how to do it:

• Select a Markdown file in Finder
• Press ⌘ I
• Select MarkEdit in the Open with: section
• Click Change All... and confirm

Command-line Tool for Opening Files

MarkEdit doesn't have a built-in command-line tool, but you can open a file in terminal with just:

open -a MarkEdit /file/path.md

Obviously, you can make a shell alias to use it as markedit /file/path.md like this:

alias markedit="open -a MarkEdit"

Alternatively, you could also add this script to /usr/local/bin/markedit:

#!/bin/bash

open -a MarkEdit $1

After running chmod 755 for this file, you can also run markedit /file/path.md to open files, learn more.

Navigating Table of Contents

When you're working on some large documents, you can navigate between the section headers using handy keyboard shortcuts:

• ⇧ ⌘ O to open the menu (and arrow keys to navigate)
• ⌥ ⌘ ↑ to select the previous section
• ⌥ ⌘ ↓ to select the previous section

Note that, ⇧ ⌘ O requires the Table of Contents item available on the toolbar to work.

Multi-caret Editing

You can easily create multiple selection, just hold ⌘ while selecting the text.

MarkEdit also allows you to select text in a rectangle, just hold the ⌥ key and start selecting.

By right-clicking, you can also choose Select All Occurrences to edit them altogether.

Code Folding

By hovering on the line number gutter, you can fold section headers, code blocks and so on.

Word Completion

MarkEdit supports word completion, you can complete the input by pressing option-esc or fn-F5:

In this mode, use arrow keys (or ctrl-n, ctrl-p) to navigate between items, enter or tab to accept a suggestion, esc to dismiss the panel.

If you rely on this feature heavily, it's recommended to enable Suggest while typing:

Built-in Text Checker

MarkEdit supports all native text checking features, you can toggle them by going the Edit menu and selecting Spelling and Grammar.

Note that if you heavily rely on automatic spelling correction, it's recommended to keep Render Invisibles as selection, which can bring better performance for autocorrect.

Alternatively, right-clicking on the editing area should also show the option.

Statistics View

MarkEdit has a built-in statistics view:

To keep the UI clean, this is not visible by default. To enable it, right-click on the toolbar and select customize:

Alternatively, you can also open it by pressing ⇧ ⌘ I (press again to dismiss).

Quick Look Extension

MarkEdit has a Quick Look extension to provide syntax highlighting for Markdown files, in the Finder app.

To enable it, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Extensions > Quick Look, and make sure MarkEdit is checked.

Grammarly

MarkEdit had built-in Grammarly support until July 2023, when Grammarly decided to discontinue their SDK for developers.

Unfortunately, they are not offering a new solution to replace the existing SDK, it is completely gone.

Please consider using Grammarly for Mac instead. It uses accessibility features to integrate into apps, and works pretty nicely with MarkEdit.

Pandoc

MarkEdit doesn't support exporting Markdown files to other formats, such as PDF or Microsoft Word. Instead, you can copy Pandoc commands in MarkEdit, and paste them into Terminal in order to execute.

The reason behind this is that we cannot do any better than Pandoc, if you write Markdown on macOS, you should really check it out: Pandoc. For detailed usage of Pandoc, please refer to their official user manual.

The Pandoc default file is located at ~/Library/Containers/app.cyan.markedit/Data/Documents/pandoc.yaml, you can change options and variables there to better fit your needs.

Customizing The Editor

MarkEdit offers a "shy" way to keep the UI clean while leave an opportunity to let some users customize the app, relies on these two files:

~/Library/Containers/app.cyan.markedit/Data/Documents/editor.css
~/Library/Containers/app.cyan.markedit/Data/Documents/editor.js

To change the appearance, just open editor.css and put your custom style sheets there (requires restarting the app to take effect).

For example, this style sheet enables "readable width" for the editor, it looks nicer when you prefer to edit files in full screen.

.cm-line {
  margin: 0 auto !important;
  max-width: 800px !important;
}

If you like more margins when line numbers are off, try this one:

.cm-content {
  margin-left: 20px !important;
  margin-right: 20px !important;
}

You can check out the styling guide to learn selectors used in CodeMirror.

Obviously, editor.js is similar but for customizing the behavior. There's window.editor to interact with, to check all available interfaces, refer to index.ts.

To debug your customizations, right click the editor, and select Inspect Element to show the web inspector.

Please note that this is not intended to replace the theming system or extension system, and there are situations that this approach cannot help with.

Resetting Preferences

If you regret making setting changes and would like to go back to the initial state, simply just remove this file and restart the app:

~/Library/Containers/app.cyan.markedit/Data/Library/Preferences/app.cyan.markedit.plist

This file will be recreated and other user data like documents won't be affected.

Advanced Topics

If you would like to manipulate text like a Pro, please check out Text Processing.