Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web

Details

External ID

49866597

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web

Website domain

markdown.beauty

Launched

Sept. 27, 2026

Cohort

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Upvotes

69

Upvotes percentile

0.8835725677830941

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 30, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 30, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Description

I've spent the last 10 months building Beauty: a local, powerful greco-roman Markdown editor where the page looks finished while you type. It runs on the Mac, iPhone and in the browser, and the browser version opens without an account: https://app.markdown.beautyI was frustrated with writing apps, and like most I used Apple Notes. After 2+ years immersed in Cursor, Codex and CC, I wished some interactions existed in a text editor.The Markdown renders in place as you write it, including tables (which you can drag and resize without lining up pipes), KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams. A lot of thought went into typography and the writing experience.Your notes on the Mac are plain .md files in a folder with images next to them, so they open in anything else too. Each note keeps 200 versions. If you share a note with a link it syncs peer to peer over WebRTC while someone has it open, and the server that connects you only ever sees a random room id.Most of the ~1,000 commits went into the editor itself. It's a contenteditable, and I don't let the browser restructure the document at all, which was a lot more work than I expected. Building this to be performant and cross-platform required some novel approaches, which I'll later open source. The editor is free with no account or ads, and there's an optional subscription for sync through your own iCloud.https://www.markdown.beauty

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