Launched this week
showmd
Markdown was never meant to be previewed plain text
206 followers
Markdown was never meant to be previewed plain text
206 followers
Ever asked yourself why all of those SKILL.md files are rendered in plain text in MacOS Preview? showmd is a free, native macOS Quick Look extension that renders Markdown beautifully. YAML frontmatter parsed into a collapsible metadata table — collapsed by default, one click to expand. No other viewer does this. Agentic AI XML tags — and 17 more — rendered as labeled, bordered blocks instead of raw angle brackets.
showmd
findable.
@jollife finally a good way to look at my markdown files that have mathematical formulas in them 🤓
showmd
@__tosh nerd! math is not really what shows up in my regular md files, but frontmatter and xml tags are. so happy to have this finally rendered in a 2026-ready way.
Visla
@jollife honestly, this is nice! congrats!
showmd
@mogabr thank you. yes, i immediately fell in love after having the first prototype running. so much better than just plain text.
@jollife Congrats. Does showmd handle live previewing or auto-reload for .md files open in VS Code/iA Writer while editing?
showmd
@swati_paliwal tbh, I think this is not supported by macos previews. have you seen such a behavior with other previews?
Sounded like my cup of team, so I tried to install with brew and
==> Fetching downloads for: johannesnagl/tap/showmd
✘ Cask showmd (1.0.1)
Error: Download failed on Cask 'showmd' with message: Download failed: https://github.com/johannesnagl/showmd/releases/download/v1.0.1/showmd-1.0.1.zip
curl: (56) The requested URL returned error: 504
showmd
@houbsta The asset exists, the URL redirects correctly, and returns HTTP 200 now. The 504 was likely a transient GitHub CDN hiccup, not a cask issue.
Tell the user to retry:
or clear the download cache first if the bad response was cached:
I just tested the download URL (showmd-1.0.1.zip, ~3.97 MB) and it returns 200 OK. Nothing to fix on our side.
@jollife yes it's working
==> Fetching downloads for: johannesnagl/tap/showmd
✔︎ Cask showmd (1.0.1) Verified 4.0MB/ 4.0MB
==> Installing Cask showmd
==> Moving App 'showmd.app' to '/Applications/showmd.app'
🍺 showmd was successfully installed!
But I'm on Sequoia, having not wanted to update to Tahoe since the last update I did bricked my Mac and led me to have to go to an Apple Store to reset it, so I am a bit wary of updating while I have a couple of projects on the go. Sequoia doesn't have "extensions" in privacy & security...
showmd
@houbsta ah, sorry to hear. i built showmd just for latest version due to exactly those differences in how extension settings are working. I thought at this point everyone already upgraded to latest mac os version.
@jollife yeah I keep looking at upgrading and finding stories of problems. I have an XCode environment all set up plus pro work on my laptop and a music setup for gigging with MainStage so I can't afford for it to break for a dumb reason like Liquid Glass. But Sequoia's Spotlight really is starting to get buggy, I'd almost think it was deliberate to get me to upgrade lol
@houbsta the same happened to me but at the second try it worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
In my case, connectivity issues with Github .
showmd
@houbsta @pepegar GitHub so unstable right now, feels like vibe coded 😭
@pepegar @jollife it's probably due to all these vibe coders using it as the default repo checking in every prompt...
showmd
@pepegar @houbsta true! 🤣
UXPin Merge
Good idea in theory. I’ve seen a lot of markdown preview tools, but most fall apart once you hit larger repos or mixed content. Curious how this compares.
showmd
@uxpinjack let me know - in my tests it performed quite ok for bigger markdown files as well.
bold positioning. most markdown apps lean into the 'it's just text' thing - this is the counter-argument.
showmd
@mykola_kondratiuk might have been true couple of years ago. but nowadays with frontmatter and xml and other stuff, markdown is really basically the opposite of "just text". glad you like the positioning.
I have a folder of nothing but .md files CLAUDE.md, MEMORY.md, various agent instructions and opening any of them in Finder has been genuinely painful for two years. Installing this right now!
showmd
@dklymentiev let me know how this feels and if there's anything still missing!
finally. something everyone needed but no one had the courage to ask for :)
showmd
@marcin_uchacz1 today, everything's a prompt away. and Claude is always happy to assist, no matter what 🤣
Hi @jollife !
App works great, I was looking for exactly this - I hate looking at md source ;).
showmd
@dominik_bartosik trust me, everyone does. 🙈