What's new

Code blocks are often the part of a document you want to take somewhere else: a command to run, a config to paste, an example to try. Selecting the code by hand is fiddly, so each code block now has a Copy button. It appears at the top right when the pointer is over the block. One click copies the code as it is written in the file, without the fence lines around it, and the button says Copied for a moment.

A long line in a code block used to mean a horizontal scrollbar. If you'd rather see all of it at once, turn on View ▸ Wrap Long Code Lines: long lines wrap inside the block. The setting is off by default, and it changes the page in place without losing your scroll position.

Since 1.6.5 the View menu could make the text column narrower or wider. Settings ▸ Appearance now has a Reading section with a slider for that width, a Default button, and the wrap switch. A change in Settings shows up in the View menu, and the other way around.

Thanks to the reader who asked for the Copy button and the wrap option.

MacMD Viewer shows Markdown; it does not edit it. But reading often leads to something else: pasting the text into a chat, fixing a typo, checking how long a page has become. These three changes make those steps shorter.

⌘C copies what you see, the rendered text. ⌥⌘C now copies the source instead: the whole file, front matter and all, byte for byte. The same command is a button in the toolbar, next to the pencil. It also works on a document you opened with New from Clipboard.

⇧⌘E opens the file you are reading in your text editor. If MacMD Viewer is your default app for .md files, it picks another editor rather than itself: the app your Mac uses for plain text, usually TextEdit. Settings ▸ General shows which editor is used, and lets you pick another one. Save in the editor and the preview follows, as it already did. The command is greyed out for a document that has no file, such as one created from the clipboard.

The bottom of the sidebar now shows how many words the document has, and how long it takes to read at 230 words per minute, rounded up to the next minute. Only the prose is counted.

The space above headings is also smaller. 1.6.5 brought each heading closer to the text below it, but left a wide gap above it in the reading window. That gap now matches the Quick Look preview.

Thanks to the readers who asked for these changes.

⌘+ and ⌘− already changed the size of the text, but nothing changed how wide the column was. On a large display, or with a long document, you may want a narrower column, or a wider one. ⌃⌘[ and ⌃⌘] now change the width step by step, and ⌃⌘0 sets it back to the width your theme uses. The commands are in the View menu. The setting applies to every document and is kept after you quit. PDF export and Quick Look previews keep their usual width.

The space below headings is also smaller. It was nearly as large as the space above them, so a heading could look like it belonged to neither block. Now each heading sits close to the text it introduces.

Thanks to the two readers who asked for these changes.

Some apps tell macOS that .md files are of the type public.markdown. Recent versions of Microsoft Word do, and so do CotEditor and Nova. Once one of them is installed, macOS files every .md under that name instead of the one Quick Look previews were registered for. The Finder then found no previewer for the file and fell back to plain text.

Reinstalling, resetting Quick Look or restarting the Finder did not help, because nothing was broken on your Mac: the preview simply did not list that type. It does now. Update, and press Space.

Thanks to the reader who reported it, with every check already done.

Opening a linked file next to your document asks for permission to that folder, once. That was the promise, and it held — until the folder was rebuilt. Docs generators delete their output folder and write a fresh one on every run, and after each run the permission dialog came back.

Thanks to Georgi for the report, and for the screenshot that showed every file in the folder "added today": that was the clue.

The cause, for the curious: macOS remembers a folder you grant by its identity on disk, not only by its path. A folder recreated at the same path is a new folder, so the saved permission comes back flagged as out of date. MacMD Viewer was discarding it at that point. It now checks that access still works and, when it does, saves a fresh copy for next time.

If you open a document whose first heading is at the very top of the file, and the tab bar is showing, that heading was missing from the outline. It was not skipped — it was laid out underneath the bar, along with half of the second one. Hiding the tab bar brought it back, which is a fix nobody should have to find.

Thanks to Jeff for the report, and for two screenshots that pinned the symptom exactly.

The cause, for the curious: with the tab bar showing, macOS tells the sidebar it runs the full height of the window — because on a lot of apps the bar does start at the sidebar's right edge. Here it does not: the bar's background spans the whole window. The sidebar was reserving 44 points of room at the top while 80 were actually covered. It now measures the real chrome instead of the one macOS describes.

This release finishes the job v1.6.0 started. Tabs shipped; this makes them behave.

The one you will feel immediately: double-clicking a Markdown file in Finder now opens it as a tab in the window you are already using, instead of scattering a new window on the pile. That was the whole promise of tabs, and it now holds for every way a file can reach the app — Finder, the Dock, the command line, links from other apps.

The tab bar is also visible as soon as tabs are on, even with a single document, so the

• button is right there instead of hiding until a second window shows up. And if you turned tabs off, the app now takes you at your word: New Tab and the + button are disabled instead of flashing a window at you.

One fix matters especially if you updated from an earlier version with your license already activated: the app could mistake that update for a brand-new install and switch tabs on without asking. Your setup is now recognized for what it is, and nothing changes under you.

Under the hood, live reload got tougher on slow and network volumes — a save that landed at exactly the wrong moment could freeze the preview until the next one — and Quick Look previews of very large documents are lighter on memory.

Tabs are the change you will notice first. Open a second document and it joins the window you were already in, the way Finder and Safari behave, instead of stacking one more window on the pile. ⌘T opens a new tab, and the toggle sits in Settings ▸ General.

If you already have MacMD Viewer installed, nothing moves until you say so: existing installs keep the previous one-window-per-document behaviour, and the What's New screen offers a single click to switch. New installs get tabs from the start.

The second change is quieter but matters if you keep notes with YAML front matter. That block at the top of the file now renders as a labelled Properties section instead of leaking into the document as ordinary text.

Underneath, the fix worth calling out is live reload. If you edit in Obsidian, VS Code, or anything else that saves by writing a temporary file and renaming it into place, the preview used to update once and then quietly stop following along. It now keeps up with every save.

Some Macs never showed the problem; on others, every .md file sat greyed out in the Open panel. The cause was a hard-coded file-type identifier that another installed app could override. MacMD Viewer now asks macOS at runtime which types are readable, so the Open panel works the same on every machine.

This update also fixes a crash when closing the Open from Path window.

Markdown files often sit next to the images they reference — a screenshots/ folder, or an image beside the document. Those now display in place.

Because MacMD Viewer is sandboxed and never writes to your files, macOS requires your permission to read images outside the document itself. The banner makes that a single click for the whole folder, rather than a prompt per image.

Paired themes mean you no longer have to pick a theme twice. Choose Solarized, Nord or Tokyo Night once and the light variant shows in daylight, the dark variant at night, following whatever macOS is doing.

The first-launch walkthrough covers the two things new users most often miss: opening a file, and setting MacMD Viewer as the default app for Markdown.

Long documents often link to their own sections — a table of contents, a "back to top" link, or a cross-reference. Those links now resolve correctly instead of doing nothing.

PDF export renders the document the way you are reading it — your selected theme, syntax highlighting, tables and diagrams all carry over. The page flows continuously rather than being cut into fixed sheets, so long code blocks and wide tables stay readable.

Printing uses the same layout, so what you send to a printer matches what you see on screen.

Document themes change the full rendered document: background, typography, links, blockquotes, tables, inline code, code blocks, and syntax highlighting. Pick a theme in Settings or from the View menu, and the open document updates in place.

QuickLook reads the same preference, so new Finder previews match the app. Finder may keep older previews cached until macOS refreshes them.