Hey HN! I built Markview after coming across RaTeX which is a library renders LaTeX natively without JavaScript or webview. I thought "How hard could it be to render the rest of Markdown natively too?"

So the result is a lightweight reader with no browser engine. Reading Markdown feels fast and fluent, yet it uses much less of your valueable RAM then most other apps.

On my laptop, it opens documents 5–20× faster than Obsidian and MarkText, depending on the content, despite I implemented Knuth's typeset algorithm, which gives me publication-quality typography.

These days I read Markdown much more than I write it because I ask LLMs to organize my thought and do the actual writing. That (partly) why I built this app a reader. (the other part is that editing is complex)

Anyway, it supports a growing set of Obsidian Flavored Markdown features. Lately I’ve been reading my own Obsidian vault exclusively in Markview, and it actually feels good.

It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android. It's free and open source so you can try it and see if it's for you.