showmd
Markdown was never meant to be previewed plain text
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showmd - Markdown was never meant to be previewed plain text

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Ever asked yourself why all of those SKILL.md files are rendered in plain text in MacOS Preview? showmd is a free, native macOS Quick Look extension that renders Markdown beautifully. YAML frontmatter parsed into a collapsible metadata table — collapsed by default, one click to expand. No other viewer does this. Agentic AI XML tags — , , , and 17 more — rendered as labeled, bordered blocks instead of raw angle brackets.

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Maker
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Hey PH! 👋 You might know me from Holdor (my first side project in years launched last month here on PH) — after that launch I dove deeper into developer tooling, and one daily frustration kept nagging me. I work with Markdown files all day. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, README.md — they're everywhere now. But every time I hit Space in Finder to Quick Look one, I'd get a wall of raw text. Hashes, dashes, angle brackets. Unreadable. So I did some research. There are a few tools that handle basic Markdown formatting, sure. But none of them understand how Markdown is actually used today — especially in agentic AI workflows. YAML frontmatter? Rendered as noise. Custom XML tags like , , ? Just raw angle brackets. That's the gap I built showmd for. It's a free, native macOS Quick Look extension. Press Space on any .md file and get an instant, beautifully rendered preview — with frontmatter parsed into a collapsible metadata table, 20+ agentic AI XML tags styled as labeled blocks, syntax highlighting for 190+ languages, KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams, and full GitHub Flavored Markdown support. All offline, all bundled, zero config. Since launching so many side projects again is fun, I thought: let's group everything together under my new side project brand yetanother.one — which should indicate: yes, I have lots of ideas, and yes... those happen mostly at night. Hope you like it! Let me know what I should build next? Spoiler: I'm currently working on something completely different — a new Android launcher.

 finally a good way to look at my markdown files that have mathematical formulas in them 🤓

Maker

 nerd! math is not really what shows up in my regular md files, but frontmatter and xml tags are. so happy to have this finally rendered in a 2026-ready way.

 honestly, this is nice! congrats!

Maker

 thank you. yes, i immediately fell in love after having the first prototype running. so much better than just plain text.

 Congrats. Does showmd handle live previewing or auto-reload for .md files open in VS Code/iA Writer while editing?

Maker

 tbh, I think this is not supported by macos previews. have you seen such a behavior with other previews?

finally. something everyone needed but no one had the courage to ask for :)

Maker

 today, everything's a prompt away. and Claude is always happy to assist, no matter what 🤣

Maker

What a great outcome from our first coding evening in years 🎉 You’ve added a lot of nice features to our initial minimal prototype – Well done!

Maker

 yes, one evening, two indie hackers, tons of ideas. felt like being in my 20s again. still have some other tabs open from last time…

💎 Pixel perfection

bold positioning. most markdown apps lean into the 'it's just text' thing - this is the counter-argument.

Maker

 might have been true couple of years ago. but nowadays with frontmatter and xml and other stuff, markdown is really basically the opposite of "just text". glad you like the positioning.

Hi !
App works great, I was looking for exactly this - I hate looking at md source ;).

Maker

 trust me, everyone does. 🙈

Sounded like my cup of team, so I tried to install with brew and
==> Fetching downloads for: johannesnagl/tap/showmd

✘ Cask showmd (1.0.1)

Error: Download failed on Cask 'showmd' with message: Download failed:

curl: (56) The requested URL returned error: 504

Maker

 The asset exists, the URL redirects correctly, and returns HTTP 200 now. The 504 was likely a transient GitHub CDN hiccup, not a cask issue.

Tell the user to retry:

brew install --cask johannesnagl/tap/showmd

or clear the download cache first if the bad response was cached:

brew cleanup --prune=all
brew install --cask johannesnagl/tap/showmd

I just tested the download URL (, ~3.97 MB) and it returns 200 OK. Nothing to fix on our side.

 yes it's working
==> Fetching downloads for: johannesnagl/tap/showmd

✔︎ Cask showmd (1.0.1) Verified 4.0MB/ 4.0MB

==> Installing Cask showmd

==> Moving App '' to '/Applications/'

🍺 showmd was successfully installed!

But I'm on Sequoia, having not wanted to update to Tahoe since the last update I did bricked my Mac and led me to have to go to an Apple Store to reset it, so I am a bit wary of updating while I have a couple of projects on the go. Sequoia doesn't have "extensions" in privacy & security...

Maker

 ah, sorry to hear. i built showmd just for latest version due to exactly those differences in how extension settings are working. I thought at this point everyone already upgraded to latest mac os version.

 yeah I keep looking at upgrading and finding stories of problems. I have an XCode environment all set up plus pro work on my laptop and a music setup for gigging with MainStage so I can't afford for it to break for a dumb reason like Liquid Glass. But Sequoia's Spotlight really is starting to get buggy, I'd almost think it was deliberate to get me to upgrade lol

 the same happened to me but at the second try it worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In my case, connectivity issues with Github .

Maker

   GitHub so unstable right now, feels like vibe coded 😭

   it's probably due to all these vibe coders using it as the default repo checking in every prompt...

Maker

   true! 🤣

I have a folder of nothing but .md files , , various agent instructions and opening any of them in Finder has been genuinely painful for two years. Installing this right now!

Maker

 let me know how this feels and if there's anything still missing!

Good idea in theory. I’ve seen a lot of markdown preview tools, but most fall apart once you hit larger repos or mixed content. Curious how this compares.

Maker

 let me know - in my tests it performed quite ok for bigger markdown files as well.