EdgeMark

EdgeMark

A native macOS side-panel Markdown notes app. Always one edge away.

Why EdgeMark exists: SideNotes nailed the interaction — a notes panel that slides in from the screen edge, always one gesture away. But it's closed-source and paid, with no way to contribute, customize, or verify what it does with your data.

EdgeMark is the open-source alternative: lightweight, Markdown-first, and yours to inspect, modify, and extend. Your notes are plain .md files on disk — open them in any editor, sync with any service, back them up however you want.

Install

brew install --cask ender-wang/tap/edgemark

Or download the latest .dmg from Releases, install it, and then run this command in Terminal:

xattr -cr /Applications/EdgeMark.app

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Features

🪟 Side Panel

• 🔲 Borderless floating panel, full-height, always on top
• 🖥️ Works on every virtual Desktop and alongside fullscreen apps
• ✨ Smooth slide-in/out or fade animation (configurable) with edge activation — move mouse to screen edge to reveal
• 🖱️ Click outside, Escape, or auto-hide dismissal
• 📌 Pin to keep the panel open — survives focus changes, mouse exit, and Space switches (great for copy-pasting back and forth)
• 🔘 Edge-toggle mode — touch the edge to open and keep the panel open while you copy text back and forth, touch again to close (no ⌘P needed); Auto-hide stays the default
• 📐 Multi-monitor support with configurable left or right edge — only the outer screen edge triggers, so moving between displays won't pop it by accident
• ↔️ Adjustable width — drag the inner edge to resize, saved across restarts
• 🧭 View modes — choose Default, Column, or Card in Settings; wide Column mode has a persistent draggable browser/editor split, while Card lays bounded note previews and folder cards with square note summaries out in a responsive Liquid Glass masonry grid
• 🪟 Panel style — toggle between Translucent and Opaque panel backgrounds
• 🎨 Panel tint — pick from a curated palette (System, Graphite, Slate, Sand, Sage, Rose)
• 🫧 Liquid Glass on macOS 26+ — enabled by default, follows the system appearance, and can be switched off for the Classic design; macOS 15.7 uses Classic automatically

✍️ Markdown Editing

• 👁️ Native TextKit 2 WYSIWYG editor — powered by swift-markdown-engine, no JavaScript or WebKit involved
• 📝 Full Markdown: headings, bold, italic, code, lists, task lists, blockquotes, links, tables, wiki-links
• 🖼️ Inline images — paste (⌘V) or drag to embed; stored as co-located asset files alongside the note
• ✅ Checked task items are automatically struck through; uncheck to restore
• ▫️ Custom task-list checkbox symbols — pick the shape for - [ ]/- [x] items (Square, Circle, Diamond, Shield, Triangle, Star, Hexagon, Heart); display-only, notes stay standard Markdown
• 📋 One-click Copy button on fenced code blocks
• 🔴 Native spell check, grammar check, and autocorrect (macOS system dictionary)
• ⚡ Slash commands (/h1, /todo, /code, /quote, /table, /divider, and more)
• ⌨️ Formatting shortcuts: ⌘B bold, ⌘I italic, ⌘E inline code, ⌘K link, ⇧⌘X strikethrough
• 🔗 Click a rendered link to open it in the browser
• 🔍 Find & Replace (⌘F)
• 🔤 Customizable editor font and size — pick any installed font via the system font panel with live preview
• 🧮 LaTeX rendering — block ($$...$$) and inline ($...$) via SwiftMath

🗂️ Notes & Storage

• 📄 Plain .md files with no injected headers — open in any editor, sync with any service; metadata lives in a hidden .edgemark/meta.json sidecar
• 📝 Filename-backed titles — a note title is its exact filename stem, while the complete Markdown document (including its first heading) stays visible and editable; external-folder discovery never renames or rewrites notes
• 🏷️ Contextual headers — note and folder names stay visible at the top; hover briefly for the full path and note dates, or click a note title to rename it
• 📁 Finder-style drag-and-drop organization — drag notes into folders, folders into folders, or notes onto notes to group them; invalid drops are rejected, name conflicts use the existing alerts, and a small preview follows the cursor
• 🎨 Custom folder colors — tint any folder's icon with a palette color via right-click → Folder Color
• 📂 Multiple storage locations — switch between separate note folders (e.g. work and personal) from the menu bar (a quick switch that reverts on restart) or Settings; optionally pick one each time the app opens
• 💾 1-second debounced auto-save
• 🔍 Search shows all notes sorted by most recently modified when the query is empty — a quick "recent notes" feed
• 🏷️ Finder-style color tags (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Gray) with rename-able labels; multi-tag per note
• 🎯 Tag filter inside search — click tag dots to narrow results, multi-select acts as OR, combines with text search
• ☑️ Native macOS multi-selection — click / ⇧-click / ⌘-click rows, marquee-drag to box-select, then batch Move, Tag, or Trash from the right-click menu; conflicts in a batch are queued and resolvable
• 🔄 External file sync — edits from other apps are detected on panel open; prompts when both sides changed
• 🗑️ Trash with 30-day auto-purge and read-only preview
• 👁️ Hover-to-peek — hover over a note or folder row to preview its contents in a floating panel alongside the list; note previews render full Markdown with images, folder previews show subfolders and all notes inside

⌨️ Keyboard & Shortcuts

• 🌐 Global shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Space toggles from any app (customizable)
• 🎹 Fully customizable local shortcuts — new note, new folder, search, pin, prev/next note — all rebindable in Settings with conflict detection
• ⏱️ Configurable activation delay and corner exclusion zones
• 🔑 Default panel shortcuts: ⌘N new note, ⇧⌘N new folder, ⌘F search, ⌘P pin/unpin
• 📋 ⇧⌘C Copy Paths — copies absolute paths for selected notes, folders, or mixed selections, one path per line; does nothing when no row is selected
• 👁️ Space to Quick Look — select a note or folder and press Space to preview; ↑↓ to browse, Space/ESC to dismiss
• 👆 Two-finger trackpad swipe right on the header to navigate back (configurable toggle and sensitivity)
• 👆 Two-finger swipe left/right on the editor or ⌘←/⌘→ to navigate between notes in the current folder

🔄 Auto-Update & CI/CD

• 🔔 In-app update check (GitHub Releases, 24h throttle)
• 📦 Download with progress bar, SHA256 verification, install & restart
• ⚙️ GitHub Actions build pipeline (unsigned Release, DMG, SHA256)
• 🍺 Homebrew Cask installation

🌟 Quality of Life

• 🌗 Appearance override: System, Light, or Dark mode
• 📌 Menu bar resident (no Dock icon)
• 🚀 Launch at login
• 📋 Copy as Plain Text, Markdown, or Rich Text — selection-aware in editor with right-click context menu
• 🎨 SF Symbol icons throughout all context menus
• 🔀 Smooth directional page transitions
• 🌍 English + Simplified Chinese + Hindi + Spanish + German (JSON-based, easy to contribute)

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for architecture overview, source tree, key patterns, localization guide, and development setup.

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License

EdgeMark is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Acknowledgments

EdgeMark is built on top of these open-source projects:

Project	License	Description
swift-markdown-engine	Apache 2.0	TextKit 2 / NSTextView WYSIWYG Markdown editor — powers the editing experience. Bundles HighlighterSwift for code block syntax highlighting and SwiftMath for LaTeX rendering.
SwiftFormat	MIT	Code formatting tool used in the build pipeline

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