A lightweight cross-platform Markdown viewer built with Rust and Tauri.

mdview is a fast, native Markdown viewer that provides:

• Clean, distraction-free reading experience
• Table of Contents (TOC) navigation
• Full-text search with highlighting
• Zoom controls
• Native OS menus (macOS/Windows/Linux)
• External link handling
• Copy functionality

This project is being developed as an experiment in LLM-assisted coding. The code, tests, and documentation were implemented using LLMs. The plan was created using GPT5.1 from OpenAI. The code was primarily generated using Claude Sonnet 4.5 from Anthropic.

• Native Performance: Built with Rust and Tauri for minimal resource usage
• Cross-Platform: Runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux
• TOC Navigation: Automatically generated table of contents from Markdown headings
• Search: Find text within documents with next/previous navigation
• Zoom: Adjust text size for comfortable reading
• Native Menus: OS-native menu system integration

Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page.

Requirements:

• Rust 1.70+ (install via rustup)
• Node.js 18+
• Platform-specific dependencies (see docs/BUILDING.md)

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/deidelma/mdview.git
cd mdview

# Install frontend dependencies
cd frontend
npm install
cd ..

# Build release binary
cd src-tauri
cargo build --release

# The binary will be at: target/release/mdview (or mdview.exe on Windows)

For detailed build instructions, see docs/BUILDING.md.

For packaging and distribution, see docs/PACKAGING.md.

# Open a Markdown file
mdview path/to/document.md

# Or launch and use File → Open from the menu
mdview

• Cmd/Ctrl+O: Open file
• Cmd/Ctrl+R: Reload current file
• Cmd/Ctrl+F: Search
• Cmd/Ctrl++: Zoom in
• Cmd/Ctrl+-: Zoom out
• Cmd/Ctrl+0: Reset zoom
• Cmd/Ctrl+Q: Quit (macOS)

• Click any heading in the Table of Contents to jump to that section
• Use the search bar to find text (supports next/previous navigation)
• External links (http://, https://, www.) open in your system browser
• Internal links (#anchors) scroll smoothly to the target section

See docs/architecture.md for architectural overview and docs/design-decisions.md for design rationale.

Development follows the plan outlined in mdview-plan.md.

• binary releases are not yet implemented
• Windows Debug Build: You may see a harmless error on exit: Failed to unregister class Chrome_WidgetWin_0. This is a known Chromium/WebView2 cleanup race condition and can be safely ignored.

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

See THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md for licenses of dependencies.