Marked 3 Is the Markdown Companion a Lot of Mac Writers Have Been Waiting For
Brett Terpstra has released Marked 3, and this is not just a routine update. It’s one of those releases that makes you stop and think about where a tool actually fits in your workflow. If you write in Markdown on a Mac, there’s a very good chance Marked has been the missing piece all along. For years, I lived in Microsoft Word for anything that wasn’t email. That was the EdTech world: Word was the standard, `.doc` and `.docx` were the expected formats, and no one wanted to hear about alternatives. Never mind the huge app footprint, the licensing mess, the cost, or the absurdity of the entire Office suite when all you really needed was a word processor. And whenever someone in tech tried to suggest something leaner — OpenOffice, Google Docs, anything that didn’t come with Microsoft baggage — the pushback was immediate and emotional. In 2015, we were literally one day away from canceling our Microsoft contract when the superintendent made a late-afternoon phone call to my boss with a $100K purchase order to renew. That was the kind of environment it was. So yes, I value the freedom to choose my own tools now. Plain text has become the backbone of the way I work. Obsidian handles notes and longer writing. Drafts is where quick capture happens. Blogging tools and publishing platforms fill in the rest. Markdown wasn’t hard to learn, and once it clicks, it’s hard to go back. But Markdown has one weakness: the writing experience is only as good as the tools around it. That’s where Marked comes in. Marked Defined Marked is not an editor. That’s the first thing to understand. It works alongside your editor, taking Markdown and rendering it live so you can actually see what your writing looks like without breaking your flow. It also works with HTML and OPML files, which makes it more flexible than a lot of people realize. And beyond rendering, Marked can convert documents to PDF, HTML, DOCX, and RTF. It also brings prose analysis, syntax checking, and integration with all sorts of writing and outlining apps. Who It’s For The short answer: anybody who writes. If you’re a coder or a technical writer, you get a lot of useful extras: Syntax highlighting for code blocks MathJax and KaTeX support Mermaid diagrams MultiMarkdown, YAML, and Pandoc metadata support CriticMarkup That’s useful, sure, but it’s not really why I care about it. For the kind of writing I do, the most valuable features are the ones that help me clean up my prose before I hit publish: Spelling and grammar checking Sentence simplification tips Word count, sentence count, and sentence complexity Reading time Grade-level scoring That’s the real value. Write where you’re comfortable, then let Marked tell you what the page actually looks like. The Little Things That Make It Better Marked has a bunch of features that sound minor until you actually start using them regularly. Flexible search. Automatic table of contents generation. Bookmarking. A visual document overview. Collapsible sections. Keyboard access almost everywhere. It’s also a very nice Markdown reader, even when you’re not editing. Auto-scroll is there. So is distraction-free mode. And if you want to read faster, there’s even an RSVP-style overlay with adjustable WPM. If you work with outlines or mind maps, Marked supports embeds from popular apps and can even turn an outline into a mind map directly. That’s a niche feature, but a genuinely useful one if your brain works that way. There are also browser extensions for sending page URLs or selected content straight into Marked 3, which is a nice touch if you spend any time collecting notes from the web. Integrations Matter Marked works the way good Mac software should: it gets out of the way and plays well with the tools you already use. That means it fits alongside Scrivener, Word, MarsEdit, Bear, Ulysses, Obsidian, and other writing apps. In v3, Scrivener rendering with live preview is new, and Bear and Obsidian callouts are now fully supported. And for the automation crowd, there’s CLI support and AppleScript. That alone makes it much more interesting than a typical “pretty preview” app. Final Thoughts If you have a Setapp subscription, Marked 3 is already there. Otherwise, you can download it directly for a free trial or pick it up from the Mac App Store. The lifetime price is $69.99, which is a little steep, though not outrageous for a serious utility you’ll keep using. The subscription option is $2.99 per month, which is much easier to justify. Marked 3 is the kind of Mac app that quietly improves everything around it. It doesn’t try to replace your editor. It makes your writing workflow better by giving you a clearer view of what you’ve actually written, and that’s a pretty compelling trick. And in classic Brett Terpstra fashion, it’s built by someone who clearly understands the people using it.
Collected discussion
Marked is a serious tool if your pain is preview, proofing, export, and Word handoff. Different lane from a plain editor, which is probably why the price feels weird to people who just want to open a .md file and change three lines. For the tiny-editor side of that spectrum, I built markjason: native macOS, just .md/.json/.env, very fast cold start, and live file sync so it does not fight Claude/Codex when an agent edits the same file underneath you. Free/no account: https://markjason.sh If you need polished long-form export, Marked/iA/Typora make more sense. If you mostly edit README, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, config, and env files, a smaller tool is nicer.
I've had markjason installed for a while.
I have always been a fan of Brett and his products. grateful for a lifetime unlock option, which is getting rarer all the time. that said, $70 feels like a lot for a markdown tool. A lot a lot… I can use it through setapp but have been slowly buying the apps I regularly use so I can eventually deprecate that subscription. but every year, I find myself renewing because there’s one app that cost so much I may as well just get them all for a little bit more and the cycle repeats itself every year.
I feel your pain
I don’t get the comparison to Word. If you are writing 10+ page documents in a Markdown file, you are using the wrong tool. If you are writing one pagers in Word, you are using the wrong tool.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on the wrongness of Markdown for longer documents, although I think whatever works for an individual is what works, so maybe it's just wrong for you. In the past couple of years, I've written over a half million words, solely in Markdown. Almost all of that writing was done in Obsidian, using a collection of plugins made for writers. I don't remember thinking a single time that I wished I was using Word. Formatting is simple, code blocks are simple, wikilinks and external URLs are simple. Maybe if I were writing a novel instead of a tech stuff, it might be different. Anyway, thanks for reading and offering feedback.
If you are writing 10+ page documents in a Markdown file, you are using the wrong tool. Says who? You? Without motivation?
Why does markdown have 6 heading sections if it’s not meant for large documents? Online documentation should be written in Markdown. But I also think that printed documents should be written in a word processor that can handle edge cases for formatting. Word is just the most powerful word processor even if it’s a bloated buggy mess
While I bought and used Marked 2, which was reasonably priced, this has gone a long way into the wrong direction. Lots of vibe-coded MD apps hitting the floor recently, hopefully not long until we get something on par for a fair price. Marked 3 probably wants to get the most out of it while there's still a market. Good luck, and thanks for the previous versions, they were nice.
I don't understand why one would write in a plain-text editor, entering Markdown marks, and then open another rendering app on the side when one can use an app like Typora, which renders Markdown marks in real time (and doesn't even require you to enter them). I use Typora for writing my articles; I never imagined, before Typora, using any other Markdown editor. I'm a writer, not a programmer, and I really, really hate seeing things like **, ##, and other marks cluttering my text, when working on it. Markdown is simpler than HTML, but in fact it poses the same problem: it makes the text unreadable. Markdown is good because text is portable, as plain text, but for me, that is its only quality. I need to SEE the structure of my text with all the things like different levels of titles, captions… Many people think that all these things (bold, italic, underline… ) are disturbing; they can't focus on their work. For me, it is totally the opposite. Without any structure and rendering options from the very first word I type or dictate, I'm lost in my text; I need to visualize it.That's what Typora gives me: instant visualization and editing function as in any word processor, and complete portability.
FluxMarkdown is completely free and supports Markdown previews. MarkEdit is also completely free and is a great little markdown editor. If you have the cash to pay for tools, iA Writer, which I consider the gold standard of Markdown editors, is $50. It also previews Markdown files and lets you edit them in an award-winning interface. If you add their iPhone and iPad app, which costs $70. I own these, and they are fantastic.
Yeah $70 is nuts for this
$70 for a markdown app is just crazy
In what world is $70 lifetime not outrageous? I've always loved these app reviews but that feels so out of touch. Apple Notes, which includes a lot of what is above, is free.
69,99 is just the introductory price, discounted from an eventual 89.90.
Just tried it out. It's a great concept but very buggy. And it's not an editor...just a viewer...a good viewer, but in the end it choked on my ~ 11000 word MD document.
iA Writer $49, Typora $15, Marked2 $14, MacDown Free, VS Code Free, FS Notes Free. In what possible universe is this a good buy?
Typora is my markdown editor for years. It’s like 15 bucks. No subscription.
I highly recommend that everyone try out this tool for themselves. I used GPT to generate a complex .MD file. Table of Contents. Obsidian callouts (open/close), complex comparison tables, very wide tables as a stress test, tables with multi-line content, Markdown code within tables, nested lists, hierarchical to-do lists (selectable!), footnotes, MathJax formulas, Mermaid diagrams plus decision trees (even zoomable) and much more. Marked 3 handled practically everything perfectly. I tested, a .MD editor couldn't even display most of it correctly. Especially since the output quality was in a league of its own. (and its export function) I’d love to buy Marked 3 (permanent unlock), but I have to complain that I can’t find any information on how many Macs I can install the program on and whether there are differences when buying from the manufacturer—the Mac App Store version is significantly pricier, (€80 Apple App store Germany) after all. Edit: ok the external app purchase is much newer than the app store version. There are many updates. And I can see differences between the newer external app vs the Apple Store app. Edit2: Brett answers my questions, even it's night in his location. The external purchase Paddle is much newer with more updates. And I can install the app on all my macs. And "The only difference between the Paddle and App Store versions is that the App Store version is sandboxed, meaning you'll have trouble running things like Pandoc with it." Edit3: Purchased at paddle for 63,- € via PP.
“Marked is not an editor. That’s the first thing to understand. It works alongside your editor…” i don’t get this part
Marked is a viewer and converter for Markdown, HTML and OpML. Some Markdown editors don't show you what your rendered text will look like. Mark does that. It also has robust search tools and it prints, unlike say, Obsidian. It's not a casual tool and if you aren't a near daily user of Markdown, you might not see the value.
I hope to give Markdown 3 a trial to decide if I want to purchase. Unfortunately, to trial the app I have to enter my credit card info. No f***g way.
Your comment about Microsoft products being heavily invested in in an institutional environment land hard for me. I am in the midst of writing a response to a proposed mandate in my work that explicitly defines Microsoft as the only acceptable suite (emphasizing Copilot as the only permitted AI) with violations punishable by job loss. It’s wild to think about how many decades Microsoft has maintained a stranglehold on intitutional imaginations (or lack thereof). I might quote your blog in my response. And yes Marked 3 is cool. I bought it on day 1 in principle (support developers) and now your review might actually help me make the most of it!
Just use Typora. Outrageous price.
How does it compare to Typora?