We macOS users have long been familiar with using Apple’s included TextEdit app for, as the name suggests, editing plain-text files. However, we macOS users who also like using Markdown have found TextEdit lacking — it can open and edit such files, of course, but it can’t do Markdown-ish things in them — and wished Apple would make it Markdown-savvy. While there’s no indication Apple ever intends to do that, the good news is that there now is a FOSS app, MarkEdit, which is essentially TextEdit that speaks Markdown. And that may well be good enough.
The vast majority of my Markdown-editing endeavors over the last few years, especially for this website, have been spent in iA Writer, and I suspect that will continue to be the case long-term.1 That said, I wrote this post mostly in MarkEdit, and found the experience to be a good one.
Other than its ability to be “Markdown-savvy TextEdit,” another of MarkEdit’s key advantages is that it’s a native macOS app. To put that another way, it doesn’t rely on Electron or any other bloated framework. This keeps it small (four MB as installed), light and quick, even on older Macs — although it’s mainly for newer ones, albeit with special, additional versions for macOS iterations from several years ago. MarkEdit also works, looks, and feels like a real macOS app. As its GitHub page explains:
UI controls remain native to macOS in both aesthetics and behavior, including force-touch word lookup, inline predictions, and Writing Tools.
Oh, and for those like me who care about such things: it appears MarkEdit is not (yet?) vibe-coded. How long that will continue to be the case, I obviously can’t know; but, for now, MarkEdit seems to be a human(s)-built endeavor.
Incidentally: to date, although the original TextEdit is on iOS/iPadOS as well as macOS, MarkEdit is macOS-only.
One other (and unrelated) item while I have your much-appreciated attention . . .
I’ve spoken here a number of times about how I converted my old Intel iMac to Linux. Most recently, my Linux distribution of choice was the Arch-based CachyOS, after I’d spent over two years with Fedora. But, while I still think CachyOS itself is pretty interesting, I’ve now reversed course and gone back to Fedora because of the craziness — still ongoing as of this writing — that we’ve seen in the Arch Users Repository (AUR) over the last few weeks. Yes, I knew and observed the correct procedures for safely using the AUR; and, besides, I really wasn’t using the AUR all that much anyway (just two packages, one of which is provided by no less than 1Password); but I simply felt better and safer in going back to Fedora. At my age, I’ll gladly pass up a little performance for greater peace of mind.
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2026-06-20 at 4:24:56 PM CDT.
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