Markdown editors on local disk

Dev-Centr publishes in AsciiDoc + Antora. Many of the developers who use Dev-Centr tooling still live in Markdown for READMEs, contributor guides, and vault-style notes. They need local tools that open plain .md on disk — not a cloud-only doc suite.

Two jobs dominate:

  • Edit — write and revise the same files the forge renders.

  • View — open a shared README or AI-exported .md without Notepad, VS Code, or an upload-to-preview site.

Recommendation: SoloMD (edit)

SoloMD is a local-first Markdown editor (Tauri 2, MIT, ~15 MB class installer) with Typora-style live edit, classic split source/preview, outline, vault agent, and BYOK AI. Source: zhitongblog/solomd.

SoloMD Welcome.md in live edit mode with outline and agent panel
Figure 1. SoloMD live edit (WYSIWYG-style)
SoloMD split view showing Markdown source beside rendered preview
Figure 2. SoloMD split view (source + preview)

Fit for Dev-Centr audiences:

  • README / project docs — edit the same files the forge renders; no export round-trip.

  • Vault-shaped folders — open a directory; outline + agent chat against local notes.

  • Offline-first — notes and keys stay on the machine by default.

Dev-Centr shop docs stay AsciiDoc. Recommend SoloMD when the user’s project is Markdown and they need to author.

Recommendation: MarkView (view only)

MarkView is a free native Markdown viewer for macOS, Windows, and Linux — “Acrobat Reader for .md”: open, render, zoom, done. It has no editing ability — you cannot change the file in MarkView. No account, no upload, drag-and-drop or double-click. (Do not confuse it with browser extensions or other products that reuse the MarkView name.)

MarkView dark-theme window rendering Biome Extension for VS Code README.md with badges and Installation section
Figure 3. MarkView reading a project README (Biome Extension)

Use MarkView when:

  • Someone shared a .md and you only need to read it cleanly.

  • You want a default OS association for Markdown without launching an IDE or vault app.

  • Privacy matters — files stay on disk.

Pair with SoloMD (or your forge editor) when you need to change the file.

Not a DevCentr product viewer

MarkView is a fine third-party OS tool for opening Markdown outside our apps. It is not how DevCentr products should render docs or Markdown in-product.

Dev-Centr already opted to keep viewing inside its own surfaces — Antora / AsciiDoc for published docs, and each app’s own rendering components and module provisions for in-app Markdown or help. Do not shell out to MarkView (or any external viewer) as the primary DevCentr reading experience; that would split chrome, theming, navigation, and component behavior away from the house stack. MarkView stays on the recommended-tools list for people’s machines, not as an embedded or default DevCentr viewer dependency.

AI and local model runners

SoloMD ships many cloud BYOK providers and first-class Ollama auto-detect, plus a generic OpenAI-compatible slot for llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, and similar. That still leaves a familiar gap: every editor special-cases a favorite local runner, then asks everyone else to paste a base URL.

The durable fix is not “add five more hard-coded ports.” It is a shared Open Provider Registry (OPR) so runners register once and every app can discover them — including SoloMD via its existing OpenAI-compatible path or a future OPR consumer.

MarkView stays out of that layer: it is read-only rendering.

See:

Related