I built a Markdown editor under 10MB because Obsidian felt too heavy

Martzcode — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:43:51 +0000

I love writing in Markdown. What I don't love is opening a 200MB+ Electron app just to jot down a note. So I built Markify - a desktop Markdown editor that weighs in at under 10MB and still ships a real feature set.

Why bother

Obsidian is great, but it's heavy, and most of what I actually need day-to-day is simpler: open a file, write, preview, export, done. Every "lightweight" alternative I tried either wasn't actually light, or was missing basics like PDF export or a proper file explorer. So I built the tool I wanted.

What's in it

Open & save .md, .markdown, .mdx files with native dialogs
Sidebar file explorer - browse a whole folder, expand subfolders on demand, just like VS Code
Three view modes: Read, Edit, and Hybrid (live side-by-side preview)
PDF export with embedded images and proper Unicode font handling
Light/dark theme that follows your system in real time
4 languages out of the box: English, French, German, Spanish
Native title bar per platform (real traffic lights on macOS, custom controls on Windows/Linux)

The stack

Angular 22 (with Signals) on the frontend, Rust on the backend, glued together with Tauri 2. That combo is exactly why the app stays small - no bundled Chromium, no Node runtime shipped, just the OS's native webview. 82 unit tests (Vitest) keep the core services honest.

Everything is open source, AGPL-3.0: github.com/Martzcode/Markify

Markdown is basically AI's native language now

Here's the other reason this project felt worth building right now: every LLM defaults to Markdown. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot for anything structured and you get headers, bullet lists, code fences, bold text - Markdown, every time. It's become the de facto output format for AI because it's plain text, unambiguous to parse, and renders cleanly almost everywhere.

That shift changes what a Markdown editor needs to be good at:

Copy-pasting AI output should just work - no reformatting, no broken tables, no mangled code blocks
Code block rendering with copy buttons matters more than ever, since so much AI output is code or config snippets
A fast, native app means you're not fighting a bloated Electron shell while pasting in a 2000-word AI-generated draft

I didn't build Markify for AI specifically, but the fact that AI assistants "think" in Markdown is part of why a fast, no-friction Markdown editor is more useful today than it was five years ago. Your notes app is increasingly also your AI-output landing zone.

Where you can get it

It's live on the Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n8tw7bf69ng - if you're on Windows, an install (or even just a rating) genuinely helps visibility.

macOS and Linux builds (.dmg, .deb, .rpm) are on the GitHub releases page. I'm currently working on getting Markify into official Linux repositories (Flathub is the top candidate) - if you've done that before and have tips, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

More of my work: martzcode.vercel.app