Edit Markdownwith a live preview.

How to edit Markdown with a live preview

The file stays plain text, saved as .md. The editor formats it as you type: headings are larger, bold and italic show at once, and the markup characters are dimmed.

1. Start editing

   Press ⌘E. With Settings → Editor → Double-click to enter edit mode on, double-clicking the page opens the editor right at that paragraph.

2. Turn on Preview

   Click Preview or press ⌥⌘E. The rendered page appears to the right of the text and updates as you type, without flicker. Whether Preview is on is remembered for next time.

3. Jump from the page to the source

   Click anything on the page: a paragraph, a heading, a list item, a table row, a code block. The editor jumps to its Markdown and highlights it in yellow for a moment. Both sides scroll together, line by line.

4. Finish

   Click Done or press ⌘↩ to go back to reading. There is nothing to save: every change is written to the file at once, ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, and Version History keeps the earlier versions.

The toolbar has the usual formatting: bold (⌘B), italic (⌘I), headings 1 to 3 (⌥⌘1 to ⌥⌘3), lists and quotes. Pressing a button again removes the formatting. Everything is also in the Format menu.

Strikethrough is ⇧⌘X and body text is ⌥⌘0. ⌘F finds and replaces text in the editor. On a narrow window the formatting buttons fold into the » menu, while Preview and Done stay visible.

Insert any element without remembering the syntax

The Insert menu puts a working example on its own lines and selects the part you will want to replace.

Lists type themselves: Enter starts the next item, Enter on an empty one ends the list, Tab indents. Paste a screenshot with ⌘V and it is saved in an assets folder next to the document, with the link inserted. Images dragged in from Finder, or chosen with Insert → Image…, are copied there too.

Retina screenshots get their on-screen width (for example |1170), so they don't look twice as large. Callouts come in five kinds: Note, Tip, Important, Warning and Caution.

Search, export and AI actions

• Search across files. ⇧⌘F searches the names and the text of every folder in your workspace.
• Export. PDF, HTML, Copy as Rich Text for Pages, Mail or Google Docs, and printing.
• AI actions. Summarize (TL;DR), Explain Selection and Fill Properties run on your Mac with Apple Intelligence, or with your own API key.

Focus mode and typewriter scrolling

Focus Mode (⌥⌘F, in the View menu) dims everything except the paragraph you are writing. Typewriter Scrolling keeps the line you are typing in the middle of the window. Font size and spell checking are in Settings → Editor.

If an AI agent changes the file while you edit, DotMD notices, keeps a version of each change and shows what changed. See Every change an agent makes.

Questions about the Markdown editor

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