Markdown Studio

A native Windows markdown editor whose headline feature is X-ray edit — right-click any rendered block in the preview to edit its raw markdown in place, then Ctrl+Enter to apply. No more bouncing between a source pane and a preview pane to fix a typo or tweak a heading.

It's also a great markdown reader. Open any folder — a documentation site, a repo full of READMEs, your library of AI prompt files — and the sidebar filters down to just the .md files. No source code, lockfiles, or build artifacts crowding the view; just the docs you actually came to read.

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X-ray edit

You're reading the rendered preview. You spot a typo, or want to bold a word, or fix a link. Most editors send you back to the source pane to find that line and edit it there.

In Markdown Studio, you right-click the paragraph, heading, list, code block — even select multiple blocks — and pick X-ray edit. That region of the preview transforms in place into a textarea pre-filled with the underlying markdown for exactly those source lines. The textarea inherits the preview's typography (Segoe UI Variable Text, 16px, 1.7 line-height), so a long line wraps at the same point you saw it wrap in the rendered text.

A couple of touches:

• Caret lands where you clicked. Right-click on a word and the cursor opens in that word. (Ctrl+E works too — it just opens the cursor at the start.)
• Multi-block edits combine the selected paragraphs/headings/etc. into one textarea covering the full source range, including the blank lines between them.
• Ctrl+Enter applies your edit back to the buffer; Esc cancels.
• "Apply" — not "Save". The change goes into the in-memory buffer, not to disk. You still control when to Ctrl+S. The tab gets a dirty dot until you do.

Under the hood, X-ray uses markdown-it's source-map metadata to tag every rendered block with the source line range it came from. The preview keeps the latest markdown source in memory, so it can slice out the raw text for the textarea with no host round-trip — only the Apply writes back to Monaco, via a small JSON message that runs executeEdits over the line range.

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Other features

• Markdown-only file tree. Open any folder and the sidebar shows just the .md/.markdown/.mdown/.mkd/.mdx files — .git, node_modules, build output and the rest stay out of the way.
• Rich preview — GFM tables, task lists, footnotes, KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams, syntax-highlighted code blocks, and editor ↔ preview scroll sync.
• Live outline sidebar parsed from your headings, click to jump.
• Full-text + file-name search across the opened folder, grouped by file.
• Six themes — Follow System, Daylight, Midnight, Sepia, Solarized Light, Solarized Dark — each one re-themes the editor and preview palettes together.
• Distraction-free mode (F11): hides everything but the editing surface.

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Install

Install from the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PK8FQXH4JKZ

Or via winget:

winget install --id 9PK8FQXH4JKZ

Updates arrive automatically through the Store.

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Getting started (from source)

Prerequisites

• Windows 10 1809+ or Windows 11
• .NET 10 SDK (dotnet --version ≥ 10.0)
• PowerShell 5.1+ (built into Windows) — needed for setup-web.ps1
• Visual Studio 2022 17.x with the Windows application development workload (optional but recommended for F5 debugging)

Build & run

git clone https://github.com/justinswork/MarkdownStudio.git
cd MarkdownStudio

# Downloads Monaco editor, markdown-it + plugins, KaTeX, Mermaid,
# highlight.js, github-markdown-css into MarkdownStudio/Web/ and
# generates the placeholder MSIX assets. Run once after cloning.
pwsh setup-web.ps1

# Build
dotnet build MarkdownStudio.sln -c Debug -p:Platform=x64

Running from Visual Studio

Open MarkdownStudio.sln, set the MarkdownStudio (Package) launch profile, hit F5. Visual Studio handles the dev signing cert and MSIX deployment for you.

Running without Visual Studio

After dotnet build succeeds, register the package and launch via the app's AUMID:

$manifest = 'MarkdownStudio\bin\x64\Debug\net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0\win-x64\AppxManifest.xml'
Add-AppxPackage -Path $manifest -Register

$pkg   = Get-AppxPackage -Name 'MarkdownStudio' | Select-Object -First 1
$appId = (Get-AppxPackageManifest $pkg.PackageFullName).Package.Applications.Application.Id
Start-Process "shell:AppsFolder\$($pkg.PackageFamilyName)!$appId"

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Roadmap

Things that aren't there yet but are good candidates:

• Folder watcher: pick up files added/removed from the opened folder while the app is running.
• Image paste / drag-drop into the editor.
• Git integration: file-tree decorations for modified files, simple diff view.
• Snippets and templates.
• Export to HTML / PDF.
• Custom user themes.

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License

TBD.