Weekend project · Now in alpha
June 26, 2026
Markdown, finally beautiful.
WYSIWYG, live-preview & raw markdown — in one window, switchable with a single keystroke. 13 themes, mermaid, math, and one-click export.
Markdown is quietly becoming the lingua franca for AI — from Karpathy-style wikis to agent skills, .md docs, and the format Claude Desktop loves to emit. Yet there still aren't many free tools that natively create and edit it: Word, VSCode and Cursor are overkill, a plain .txt editor is too basic, and Typora is a $15 paywall I took one look at and noped out of. So I hacked together my own Mac app in a weekend.
Three ways to write
One document. Three ways to write.
WYSIWYG hides the formatting symbols, Notion-style. Hybrid gives you Typora-style live preview with the syntax still visible. Raw is plain markdown when you want full control. Flip between them with ⌘1 / ⌘2 / ⌘3 — no mode switcher to fight, no preview pane to babysit.
Themes
Thirteen themes. Pick your mood.
Marko Light/Dark, Sepia, Nord, GitHub, Solarized, Dracula, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Rosé Pine, Everforest, Catppuccin Mocha — plus drop in your own CSS. Premium fonts and per-theme accents are baked in, so it looks good before you touch a setting.
What it does
Everything you reach for, in one window.
Diagrams from text
Mermaid flowcharts, sequence and gantt diagrams, rendered live as you type.
Math, beautifully typeset
Inline and block equations via KaTeX, set naturally in the page.
Code, highlighted
Syntax highlighting across dozens of languages, theme-aware.
Export anywhere
PDF (with bookmarks), Word, OpenDocument, EPUB, LaTeX, MediaWiki — Pandoc is bundled, zero setup. Import the same formats back.
Distraction-free writing
Focus mode dims everything but the current block; typewriter mode keeps your line centered.
Typography that ships with the app
13 bundled fonts and 7 one-click pairings — no theme-hunting required.
Why I built it
Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Marko started as a pile of small frustrations. Writing markdown was fine; everything around it was broken. I wanted to sketch a Mermaid diagram and actually watch it render. Pull a table out of a PDF, or hand a clean Word file back, without a detour. Build a table without counting pipes by hand. Just preview formatting as I typed — fast, snappy, no lag. No single tool did all of that well, and stitching five together was its own kind of misery.
So over a weekend I built the one I'd been wishing for — first commit to a working app in two days. Modern tooling makes "beautiful and powerful" the default now, so there was no reason to settle for less. Three writing modes, 13 themes, Mermaid and math rendered live, real tables, task lists, footnotes, and full Pandoc import/export — all in one window that gets out of your way.
And Typora? Solid app — but it's a $14.99 ask, and I figured I could just build the one I actually wanted. So I did.
Alpha access
Now in alpha — and free.
Marko is in alpha, so it's free right now. Login here, and email me with a request and I'll send you a copy. macOS only for the moment (Apple silicon) — Web/Windows will follow if there's appetite and good feedback.
- Free while it's in alpha — no card, no catch.
- Works fully offline — turn your internet off and it still runs.
- Safe to vet — run it through any antivirus check you like.
- It might have some rough edges, so I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Wharton students — grab a copy straight from the alpha Drive.
Pricing
Pricing? Coffee first.
Marko is free while it's in alpha. A little “buy me a coffee” link is on the way for anyone who wants to chip in. And if there's ever a real price, it won't be $14.99 — or if it somehow is, I'll have packed in some killer features to earn it. Honestly, your feedback shapes where this goes more than any price tag will.