MarsDawn

MarsDawn and other ways to read Markdown on a Mac

For anyone choosing how to read and review Markdown on a Mac, often what an agent wrote. Every cell below comes from the vendor's own pages or our own check, all on 16 October 2026; products change, so a cell can go stale. If you spot a mistake, write to the address on Support.

MarsDawnVS Code previewObsidianQLMarkdownLynxOffice
Open a local .mdYes; edits the file in place [app 1.1.1]Yes; preview with ⇧⌘V [8]Not stated by the vendor [21]Preview only: "for viewing Markdown files" [22]"Markdown opens rendered and saves back verbatim." [3]
MermaidBuilt in [1]Built in [8]Built in, note syntax [16]Built in, mermaid fences [22]"diagram blocks are not rendered" [3]
MathKaTeX, $…$ and $$…$$ [kit]KaTeX [8]MathJax [16]MathJax [22]"Footnotes, math, and diagram blocks are not rendered." [3]
Review an agent's plan / jump to a linemarsdawn open file:line; updates from disk; Copy Reference [/cli/, /features/]Markdown diff preview, changed lines highlighted [8]; code -g file:line [14]No line parameter in obsidian://open [20]Not stated by the vendorCLI and MCP server; no line jump stated [4, 5]
PDF: page breaks, page numbersBreaks avoid splitting short code blocks [/pdf/]; no page numbers [check]Not stated by the vendor [8]Paper size, margins; breaks and numbers not stated [17]Not stated by the vendor [22]PDF "including tables"; breaks and numbers not stated [3]
PriceFree download; Unlock USD 4.99 once; 14-day trial [1]Not stated by the vendor [12, 13]Personal: "Free without limits"; commercial licence optional [15]Free, GPL-3.0 [22]"Free while in early release." [2]
System requirementsmacOS 26.0 or later [1]"the latest release and the two previous versions" [9]Not stated by the vendor [18]macOS 12.0 or later [23]macOS 13 or later [2]
Account neededNo [/privacy/]Not stated by the vendor"No sign-up required" [15]Not stated by the vendorNo [2]

Every cell was checked on 16 October 2026 against the source in brackets (V-ids are listed below; [check] is our own export with marsdawn 0.6.4). Vendor quotes stay as written. "Not stated by the vendor" means the pages we read were silent, not that the feature is missing. No cell ranks the products. MarsDawn's own cells were updated on 29 October 2026 for the iPhone and iPad app.

Sources

What MarsDawn lacks. It needs macOS 26 or later. On iPhone and iPad it only reads: it can't edit or export PDFs there. There's no shared editing, no sync and no account. The preview can't be edited; you edit the Markdown source beside it. It doesn't export Word files and has no plugins. Its PDFs have no page numbers. There's no diff view: when an agent saves a change, the open window updates from disk in one step you can undo, but it doesn't highlight what changed. After the 14-day trial, documents open with their content covered until you unlock it.

When you don't need MarsDawn