Mac app · 2026
Emdee
AI tools write everything in markdown, the plain-text format with pound signs for headings and asterisks for bold, and they generate it faster than anything can open it. So I built Emdee: a stupid-simple markdown viewer for the Mac. Double-click a .md, it opens before you've let go of the mouse, and it looks like something a person designed.
- Type a slash and the file stays plain markdown.
- Six reading faces, all already on your Mac.
- ⌘⇧E flips to the raw source. Same bytes underneath.
Under the hood it's a native Mac app around an editor that behaves like the note app you're probably picturing. Type a slash for a menu of blocks, drag paragraphs around, and diagrams and math written as text render live. Flip to the raw text with ⌘⇧E when you want to see what's really in the file. The file on disk stays plain markdown the whole time: save without touching anything and the bytes are identical.
The part I'm proudest of is the typography. Six presets built from fonts that already ship with macOS, each tuned for reading. Pick Charter and a long doc stops feeling like a terminal.
What's next: I keep finding .md files I want to annotate rather than edit. Maybe that's version two.
