Marked 3

Marked does one job: it watches a markdown file you are editing somewhere else and shows you what it will become. You keep writing in BBEdit, iA Writer, VS Code, Obsidian or whatever you already trust, and Marked refreshes on save. That division of labour is why writers who refuse all-in-one apps keep it in the Dock for years.

The preview is a publishing tool rather than a pretty pane. Point it at MultiMarkdown, Pandoc, Discount or a processor of your own; style it with your site's own CSS so what you see is what the page will look like; generate a table of contents; export a scoped chunk — one section, one file, or a folder stitched together in order — to PDF or HTML. It also counts words, flags words you have repeated too often, and scores readability.

Version 3 is sold mainly by subscription, currently $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, with a permanent unlock at $69.99 that goes to $89.99 once the introductory period ends. Marked 2 is still available outright at $14.99 if all you want is a window that renders markdown.

If you write markdown occasionally and only need to check that a list looks right, your editor's built-in preview is enough and this is an expensive habit. Marked earns the unlock when export is part of your actual work — when the PDF you hand someone comes out of it every week.