Name: Readdown
Rating: 5.0 (2 reviews)

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

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.

I use Readdown every day, it does extremely well surfacing the information I print with my agents, it gives me a no nonsense, blazing fast experience.

I just tell my agents to write to .md and run `open` on the file so I can read it in my reader of choice.

It's just great.

It's also lifetime free, and it's gets meaningful updates from feedback of a growing community of users and collaborators.

Natalia and Eixo really making a difference here, thank you so much!

It does that one thing, better than all others.

There's real purposeful design for humans here.