What's new

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.