Natalia Arsand

Readdown - Stop opening .md files in whatever your Mac defaults to

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The Markdown reader macOS never shipped. Double-click to read, spacebar to preview. Free, native, lightweight.

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Natalia Arsand
Hey everyone! I'm Natalia, and this is my first time launching something at Product Hunt. I've been building quite a few apps lately with the help of AI, and I thought I'd give it a try by spreading this one out. I built Readdown out of my own frustration: every time I wanted to have just a quick look at any .md file on my Mac, it would open in Xcode. A full, heavy IDE just to read a text file. It was driving me CRAZY. I tried defaulting to other options like VS Code, since that's mostly always opened, or TextEdit to be more lightweight, but they all felt wrong for just a quick read and would get in the way of my workflow. I didn't want to edit the files, I just wanted to see the rendered Markdown without hassle. So I built Readdown. It does one thing: opens .md files and renders them beautifully. That's it. My favorite part is that I also added Quick Look support, so you can select any .md file in Finder, press spacebar, and you get a fully rendered preview without even opening the app. Once you get used to it, you can't go back. It's native Swift, follows your system dark/light mode, and has zero telemetry, and it's also public on Github if you'd like to catch (and fix) my (and Claude's) bugs. Would love to hear your thoughts! Cheers.