The editor

The editor renders Markdown as you type. Rather than a split pane with source on one side and preview on the other, there is one surface: markers hide themselves until your cursor enters the paragraph they belong to, then fade in so you can edit them.

Screenshot editor-wysiwyg.png

A note rendered live in the editor, with a heading, bold text, inline code and a table.

Put the cursor in a heading and the ## reappears, dimmed. Move away and it hides again. Nothing is ever hidden from the file itself — only from the display.

Raw mode

Press ⌃E, or click the document icon in the toolbar, to see the plain Markdown source with syntax colouring only — no hidden markers, no heading sizes, no rendered tables.

Screenshot editor-raw-mode.png

The same note in raw mode, showing plain Markdown source with syntax colouring.

Useful when a document’s structure is not doing what you expect.

Read-only mode

⌘E makes the current note read-only. The rendering is unchanged; the text simply cannot be edited. Good for a reference note you keep open and would rather not typo into.

Caution

⌃E and ⌘E are one modifier apart and do different things. ⌃E changes how the text is drawn; ⌘E changes whether you can type.

Moving lines

⌥↑ and ⌥↓ move the current line — or the selected lines — up and down. Useful for reordering a list without cutting and pasting.

Zoom

Action	Shortcut
Zoom in	⌘=
Zoom out	⌘-
Actual size	⌘0

Zoom affects the editing surface only, not the sidebar or toolbar, and persists across restarts.

Line numbers and whitespace

Both can be turned on independently for each of the three modes — raw, editing and read-only — in Preferences → Editor. Line numbers in raw mode but not while writing is a common preference.

Fonts and margins

Body, monospace, heading and table fonts are each set separately, as is the editor margin. → Editor settings

Code blocks

Fenced blocks with a language tag are syntax-highlighted. Soft wrap, maximum width, a language header and line height are all configurable.

```swift
let greeting = "Hello, world"
print(greeting)
```

Highlighting covers Swift, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash/Shell, JSON, HTML, CSS and Rust.