Markpad

What's new in 2.9.1

A release about windows and tabs: Markpad now remembers every window, keeps what you have not saved, and can show your tabs and a folder down the side.

Changed

• Quitting no longer asks about unsaved changes. Unsaved tabs are kept and come back the next time Markpad opens, text and all. The same copy saves your text after a crash. Closing a single tab, or one of several windows, still asks. To get the old question back, turn off Settings → Files → Restore unsaved changes on launch.
• Auto-Reload starts on. When another program changes a file you have open and have not edited, Markpad shows the new text. A tab with unsaved edits is never reloaded; it shows a bar asking what to do. Turn it off per window with the Auto-Reload button in the title bar or, on macOS, View → Auto-Reload.
• PDF export margins are 1 cm, down from 0.75 in.

New

• Every window comes back. Quit with three windows open and all three reopen, each with its own tabs, position and size. After a crash they come back with their tabs, at the default size. Turn it off in Settings → Files → Restore windows on launch.
• New empty window: ⇧⌘N (Ctrl+Shift+N on Windows and Linux).
• Full macOS menu bar. File, Edit (with Format), View and Window, in the app's language. View toggles show a checkmark when they are on.
• Tabs down the side. Settings → Appearance → Tab Position: Top, Left Column or Right Column. A column shows each file's full name and can be resized by dragging its edge.
• Open a folder in a sidebar. ≡ → Open Folder… shows the folder as a tree. With tabs in a column, the two stack, with a divider between them.
• Newlines as spaces, if you want. Turn off Settings → Preview → Every Newline Breaks the Line and a newline inside a paragraph shows as a space, as on GitHub. Hard-wrapped files then read as normal paragraphs. On by default, which is how Markpad always worked.
• Resize table columns. In the preview, drag a border between two columns. Double-click a border to go back to automatic widths.
• Choose which window opens a file. Settings → Files → Open external files in: Last window (as before) or Ask me, which lists the open windows when you open a file from Finder or Explorer.
• Undo, Redo and Select All in the editor's right-click menu. Settings → Shortcuts now lists Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy and Paste.
• PDF export shows progress. On Windows it then offers to open the file, as HTML export does.
• Windows: Markdown files get their own icon in Explorer.
• .mdown and .mkd files now list Markpad under Open With.
• Every language is complete. About 3,000 texts that showed in English in other languages are now translated.

Faster

• Large files no longer freeze while you type. In split view the preview only redraws the part you changed. On a 5 MB file it used to stall for over two seconds after each word.
• Starting with many tabs is quick. Only the tab on screen is loaded at startup. The others load when you click them.

Fixed

• When a file changes on disk while you have unsaved edits, the bar now appears right away, not only when you save. It no longer covers the editor toolbar.
• Opening a file that is already open in another window switches to that window, instead of opening it twice.
• The same file no longer opens in two tabs when it arrives under two spellings (readme.md and Readme.md, a symlink, or C:\ and C:/ paths). The two tabs used to overwrite each other.
• Several cases where text could land in the wrong tab or be lost: switching tabs while a file was reloading, typing while a tab moved to another window, renaming a tab while it was saving, and the "file changed on disk" bar acting on the wrong tab.
• Cmd/Ctrl+S on a file with no changes no longer rewrites it. This stops sync apps from uploading a file nothing changed in.
• Find in the preview matches text across

What's new in 2.8.4

A small release about tables.

• Wide tables have two settings. In Settings → Preview:

  • Wide Tables Can Exceed Max Width, off by default. On, a table wider than the text grows into the side margins, as in 2.8.0–2.8.3. Off, it stays within Max width.
  • Scroll Wide Tables, on by default. On, a table that still does not fit keeps its words whole and scrolls sideways, as on GitHub. Off, the whole table is squeezed to fit, breaking words where it has to.

  If you liked tables using the margins, turn the first one on.

• npm audit is clean again. Two dependency advisories are fixed: source-map-js, and the copy of KaTeX that Mermaid used.

Download

[!NOTE] Windows SmartScreen Notice: Windows executables are not signed with an Authenticode certificate, so SmartScreen shows them as an unrecognized app. Click "More info" → "Run anyway". The antivirus heuristic that used to flag the portable .exe no longer does.

[!NOTE] macOS folder access: Coming from 2.7.x or earlier, macOS asks for folder access once more after this update. From now on the grant carries across updates.

If you gave Markpad Full Disk Access in 2.7.x or earlier, that grant no longer applies, and macOS asks each time Markpad saves to Desktop or Documents. Renew it once: in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, select Markpad, remove it with −, then add /Applications/Markpad.app again with +.

The two Windows files differ only in that one installs and one does not. Package managers: choco install markpad-app (Windows), brew install --cask markpad (macOS), sudo snap install markpad (Linux).

What Markpad renders

Every syntax Markpad renders is in one document — download markdown-syntax.md (简体中文) and open it in Markpad: the preview shows each feature working, the editor beside it shows how each one is written. Give the same file to an AI and it knows exactly what Markpad can render: ask it to reformat a document you already have, or to write a new one that uses the whole range — callouts, tables, footnotes, maths, diagrams — and open the result here. Read it on GitHub.

What's Changed

• ci(release): drop the one-time macOS folder access note by @PathGao in https://github.com/sftwrdotdev/Markpad/pull/926
• fix(preview): a table cell no longer breaks inside a word (#927) by

What's new in 2.8.3

A release about speed, plus a handful of fixes.

• Faster startup. Markpad starts with English only and fetches your language the first time it is needed, so the startup code is about a fifth smaller. Code highlighting, maths and diagrams load only when a document uses them. A plain-text document no longer downloads about 1.9 MB of libraries.
• Large files open faster. Opening a file used to render it twice. It renders once now. Documents with lots of maths no longer slow down sharply as they grow: a 1.6 MB test document went from 3.3 s to 0.12 s to render.
• Typing and scrolling do less work. The word count waits for a pause in typing and is skipped when it is hidden. Scrolling no longer re-reads the whole document. Folding and the outline share one pass instead of two. The preview parses each update once fewer and finds lines on scroll without walking the whole page.
• No more freezes on paste or save. Pasting a large image and saving the session no longer block every window. An external save that touches the file several times now reloads once.
• Tables wrap between words. A short column next to a long one no longer breaks words in the middle. A table that still does not fit scrolls sideways.
• Exports keep your fonts. PDF and HTML exports now carry the preview's font, font size, code font, code font size and highlight colour.
• Wayland paste works. On Linux under Wayland, paste reads the system clipboard instead of the last thing copied inside Markpad.
• Small fixes. Dragging a document over the editor says Drop to Open. The settings dialog no longer grows a little every time its header is clicked.

Download

[!NOTE] Windows SmartScreen Notice: Windows executables are not signed with an Authenticode certificate, so SmartScreen shows them as an unrecognized app. Click "More info" → "Run anyway". The antivirus heuristic that used to flag the portable .exe no longer does.

[!NOTE] macOS folder access: Coming from 2.7.x or earlier, macOS asks for folder access once more after this update. From now on the grant carries across updates.

If you gave Markpad Full Disk Access in 2.7.x or earlier, that grant no longer applies, and macOS asks each time Markpad saves to Desktop or Documents. Renew it once: in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, select Markpad, remove it with −, then add /Applications/Markpad.app again with +.

The two Windows files differ only in that one installs and one does not. Package managers: choco install markpad-app (Windows), brew install --cask markpad (macOS), `sudo snap install ma

What's new in 2.8.2

A release about writing with fewer distractions, and about settings that say what they do.

• Focus Mode and Typewriter Mode. Two new switches under Appearance, next to Zen Mode. Focus Mode dims everything outside the paragraph you are in. Typewriter Mode keeps the line you are on in the middle of the editor. Each of the three now has one line saying what it does.
• Temporary highlights in the preview. Select text, right-click, and mark it or every copy of it. Nothing is written to the file. A second setting faintly marks other copies of whatever you select. Both are off by default, under Preview.
• Export and import settings. Settings → Files can save all your settings, installed themes included, to a JSON file and load them on another machine.
• The preview cursor is now a setting, off by default. Turn on Click in Preview Places Cursor to get 2.8.1's behaviour back. With it off, the outline follows what you scroll to in the preview.
• Task lists render right. Ticking a sub-task no longer strikes its parent and siblings, and leaves no gap below. Plain items in a mixed list keep their bullets. Folding a section no longer turns the chevrons inside it.
• Animation settings are yours. Animate Scrolling on Jump and Animate Cursor Movement no longer get switched off silently by the system's reduce-motion setting.
• Settings are easier to find. How files open, save and restore now all sit under Files. Some labels were renamed to say what they control, for example Table of Contents Highlights is now Outline Follows and Restore State on Reopen is now Reopen Previous Tabs.

Download

[!NOTE] Windows SmartScreen Notice: Windows executables are not signed with an Authenticode certificate, so SmartScreen shows them as an unrecognized app. Click "More info" → "Run anyway". The antivirus heuristic that used to flag the portable .exe no longer does.

[!NOTE] macOS folder access: Coming from 2.7.x or earlier, macOS asks for folder access once more after this update. From now on the grant carries across updates.

If you gave Markpad Full Disk Access in 2.7.x or earlier, that grant no longer applies, and macOS asks each time Markpad saves to Desktop or Documents. Renew it once: in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, select Markpad, remove it with −, then add /Applications/Markpad.app again with +.

The two Windows files differ only in that one installs and one does not. Package managers: choco install markpad-app (Windows), brew install --cask markpad (macOS), sudo snap install markpad (Linux).

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