What is Markdown?
Plain text, with a handful of punctuation marks that mean something. A hash makes a heading. Two asterisks make bold. A dash starts a list. That is most of it — and the file stays readable even before anything turns it into a document.
Writing in Markdown is cool
Not because it is clever. Because of what it stops happening.
You never take your hands off the keyboard
Bold, headings and lists are characters you type, in the flow of the sentence you are already writing. There is no toolbar to reach for, no dialog, and nothing to click before the thought is finished.
The raw file is still readable
Open it in anything — a terminal, an email, a text box — and it reads as writing. This is the difference between a format that marks text up and one that wraps it: nothing has to be installed before your own words make sense.
Nothing owns your words
A Markdown file is a file. It sits on your disk, it opens in any editor written in the last forty years, and no company can put it behind a login or a monthly fee. That is also the reason this tool costs $7 once instead of renting you access to your own documents.
It works with version control
Because it is text, a change is a line. Git can show you exactly what moved between two drafts, which no binary document format can do without opening both of them and squinting.
Assistants already write it
Ask ChatGPT or Claude for a summary and what comes back is Markdown — headings, lists and tables, already structured. So the thing you were handed is already the input format, with no conversion step in between. There are doors for exactly that: ChatGPT to PDF and Claude to PDF.
To be exact about it: no assistant is involved in making your PDF. Your document is never sent to one, never read, and is deleted within an hour.
One source, many endings
The same file becomes a web page, a set of slides, a README or a printed document, depending on what you point at it. Plenty of tools do those conversions; this one does the last of them, and tries to do it properly.
Try a symbol
Change the text on the left and watch the page change. This is the real renderer, not a picture of one.
See every symbol — the full cheat sheet, all of it live.
Turn some into a PDF
Paste a document, check the preview, download the file. No account, and what you paste is deleted within an hour.