MarkEdit

MarkEdit is what TextEdit would be if Apple had kept going with markdown. It is a document-based Mac app in the ordinary sense: you open a .md file, it highlights the syntax, folds sections, previews when you ask, and saves back to the same file. No vault to create, no library to import into, no account, no onboarding.

That narrowness is the appeal. If your notes already live as files — in a Dropbox folder, a git repo, an Obsidian vault you want to edit from outside — MarkEdit binds to them the way a text editor should, and it opens quickly enough that setting it as the default handler for .md is a reasonable thing to do.

It is MIT licensed and genuinely free, distributed as a signed disk image from GitHub releases or through Homebrew. There is no paid tier waiting later and nothing to upgrade to. Support is an issue tracker run by its developer, which has been responsive, but it is not a company with a support desk.

Current releases want macOS 15 or newer. There are tagged builds for macOS 12 through 14 if you are on older hardware, but they will not keep pace. And it handles one file at a time — no backlinks, no cross-folder search, no iOS app. If what you want is a notes system rather than an editor, look at Obsidian or Zettlr instead.