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Paddown

A lightweight, project-oriented Markdown editor that renders with proper chat interface styling. Browse all your .md files, write and edit your notes, then paste into your LLM chat or terminal without any formatting surprises.

License: MIT

Download the latest version (Windows and Ubuntu 24.04 confirmed working; macOS DMG built but untested)

Paddown

Why Paddown

I built this because I keep a lot of Markdown files around for projects using LLM and couldn't find an editor that wasn't either too heavy or too bare-bones.

Project sidebar: Pin folders and browse your .md files in a collapsible tree. Filesystem changes are watched in real-time, so it stays in sync without you doing anything.

Lightweight: Built on Tauri v2 using the system's native WebView instead of bundling Chromium like Electron does. The portable exe is ~11 MB, the installer under 3 MB.

Rendering: The preview pane is modeled after Claude's chat interface -- similar typography, code blocks, spacing, the works.

Features

  • Split-pane live preview with drag-to-reorder tabs
  • Formatting toolbar
  • Scroll sync
  • HTML and PDF export
  • Autosave with crash recovery, atomic file writes
  • Single-instance: double-clicking a .md file in your file manager opens it in the running window instead of spawning a second one
  • Find & replace with in-editor match highlighting, syntax highlighting, dark mode, external file change detection, portable mode, auto-update checker
  • Keyboard focus rings and prefers-reduced-motion support

Platforms

Platform Format
Windows NSIS installer + portable exe
Linux AppImage (tested on Ubuntu 24.04)
macOS DMG (built, not tested)

Tech Stack

Layer Technology
Desktop shell Tauri v2 (Rust backend + system WebView)
Markdown parser marked.js v4.3.0 (bundled locally)
Frontend Vanilla HTML / CSS / JS

No npm, no node_modules, no build step for the frontend.

Building from Source

You'll need Rust and the Tauri CLI.

cargo install tauri-cli --version "^2"
cd src-tauri
cargo tauri build

On Linux, you'll also need: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libappindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf.

License

MIT

About

a nice looking lightweight Markdown editor with live preview, project sidebar, etc. built on Tauri v2.

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