Show HN: Marky – A lightweight Markdown viewer for agentic coding
33 points
8 hours ago
| 5 comments
| github.com
| HN
Hey HN,

In this age of agentic coding I've found myself spending a lot of time reviewing markdown files. Whether it's plans or documentation that I've asked my agent to generate for me, it seems that I spend more time reading markdown than code.

I've tried a few different solutions to make it easier to read such as Obsidian however I've found their Vault system to be quite limiting for this use case and I've found TUI solutions to not quite be as friendly to read as I've wanted so I made Marky.

Marky is a lightweight desktop application that makes it incredibly easy to read and track your markdown files. It also has a helpful cli so you can just run marky FILENAME and have the app open to the md file that you pointed it at. I've been using the daily over the past week and I really enjoy it so I figured I'd share it.

Here's a video if you want to check out a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGBxt8uOVjc.

I have plans to add more features such as incorporating agentic tools such as claude code and codex into the UI as well as developing a local git diff reviewer to allow me to do local code review before pushing up to git.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and any feature suggestions you may have :)

mschulkind
7 minutes ago
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Seems like I'm just part of the club here, but I've also been working on something similar recently.

https://vantageapp.dev/

I find connecting understanding between humans and agents is one of the most important parts of the agentic development cycle, and markdown is a great way to handle that.

Not only can you point it at an entire directory, you can point it at multiple projects, quick load a project with a keyboard shortcut, and also easily see recent file that changed to help you find the 75th file your agent just wrote for you.

Recently, I've started to add a review interface where you can track changes, and add comments for your agent, and then instead of trying to do some complicated integration with an agent, it just has a copy button, and it copies all the comments, which context, and instructions for the agent how to reply.

I also find that I generate TONS of markdown junk during development, and I needed a way to handle it and keep it out of the main repository so I built this tool:

https://github.com/mschulkind-oss/swarf/

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yakkomajuri
22 minutes ago
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I did something very similar recently, just made it open source but haven't posted anywhere.

https://github.com/yakkomajuri/seams

Run `seams .` in any dir and get a rich markdown editor with image uploads, block editing, tables, etc etc

Congrats on launching!

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FailMore
2 hours ago
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I like the folder opening and the idea to integrate Claude is very interesting. I’m also curious to know how you did the document rendering. It looks very good.

This problem has risen to the top of many people’s minds at this moment (including mine!). My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) is on the /show page now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).

My approach is a little different. I think Markdown might end up being a core document type in the future of work, so I tried to blend Markdown with “Office”-like functionality, such as complex styling and in-browser editing.

Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):

https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...

The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").

The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.

This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the (quite long!) url.

Also, I’m sorry I high jacked your post to some degree with this comment. It’s just a little too relevant for me not to leave a comment!

I use mine daily too. A solid Markdown renderer definitely makes agentic coding a lot more pleasurable.

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_andrei_
2 hours ago
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ha, nice - had the same need, i leveraged fumadocs for the ui part https://github.com/3rd/mdreader
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GRVYDEV
2 hours ago
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Awesome that’s a super interesting approach
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desireco42
2 hours ago
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Definitely appreciate this. I already have Typora which is commercial but fantastic product so I don't really need another viewer but others for sure will.

Glad you used Tauri to make this. I will check it out.

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mech422
6 minutes ago
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I tend to use 'bat' or 'glow' though I've tried 'mdlook' and 'mdcat' as well.
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Arubis
54 minutes ago
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Can +1 Typora, it's quite excellent.
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GRVYDEV
2 hours ago
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Oh nice! I’ve never checked out Typora before I’ll take a look as well
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