A few months ago the editor that mattered was the IDE. Zed, VS Code, Vim, whatever let me move fast in code.
Most of my work now sits with coding agents. They write the change, they draft the review, they leave notes in the repo. What I still own by hand is the Markdown around that work: AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, READMEs, design notes, decision logs. Those files are the context and memory the next agent will read. If they are stale or messy, the agent gets a worse picture of the project than I do.
That shift is easy to miss because the files look small. They are not the product. They are the instructions sitting next to the product. Agents pick them up first. So do new contributors. So do I, three weeks later, when I have forgotten why a decision was made.
IDEs are fine at opening a .md file. I needed something better. Split preview. Syntax soup. A ribbon that has nothing to do with the document. A marketplace plugin that wants to become its own product inside the editor I already fight with.
I wanted something fast, local, and intuitive, switch to source when I need it and get back to the rendered page without fighting the tool. One last requirement: no plugin.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Plugins inherit the IDE's layout, its settings model, its update cycle. I did not want Markdown quality to depend on whether the right extension was installed on this machine today.
That is the gap I built Markify to fill. Native Mac app. Ordinary .md files. Rendered page and source as two views of the same text. The caret stays put when you flip. Git sees exactly what you typed.
It is not a second brain. It does not sync your life into a cloud vault. It opens the file, lets you read it as a page, and writes Markdown back to disk.
Source is on GitHub here:
https://spaquet.github.io/markify/
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