Help Shape Markdown Lens

A note from John

Hi — I'm John, the person who built Markdown Lens. I'm not just a developer making a markdown app, I am a writer like you staring at a folder full of .md files. I write in markdown every day — release notes, planning docs, the help content inside this very app — and I built Markdown Lens because the existing tools kept making me sigh. Either they were bloated, or they got the rendering subtly wrong, or they treated my files like data instead of like writing. So I made my own.

Now I'm thinking about what comes next, and I'd rather not guess. If you have two minutes, I'd love your input on a couple of things.

Should I keep supporting older macOS?

Markdown Lens currently runs on macOS 12 Monterey or later. Version 2.20 is the final release that supports Monterey, but I'm seriously considering going further — raising the minimum to macOS 15 Sequoia for the next major release.

Here's the honest tradeoff. Every release I ship gets tested on four OS versions, around bugs Apple already fixed in newer ones. A handful of the rough edges in the app today — the first-click sidebar thing, some scrollbar weirdness — only exist on the older systems, and they don't have clean fixes until I drop those versions. Newer macOS APIs would let me make the app meaningfully better in places I haven't been able to touch.

But I'm not going to do it without hearing from people first. If you're using Markdown Lens on macOS 12 Monterey, macOS 13 Ventura, or macOS 14 Sonoma, and bumping the minimum would actually be a problem for you, please tell me. Even a one-liner helps. If you're already on Sequoia or later, you don't need to do anything — the change won't affect you.

What about markdown drives you nuts?

This is the part I really want to hear about. I love markdown, but I also know it has sharp edges that you only feel after you've written a few hundred documents in it. The whole point of the next major version is to file down the sharpest of those edges — but I don't want to spend a year polishing the wrong ones.

So: where does markdown get in your way? A few prompts to get you started — grab whichever one resonates, ignore the rest, or tell me about something I didn't think to ask:

• When you reorganize a long document, what breaks?
• Is there a kind of markdown content you actively avoid because the source becomes unreadable?
• When you have to update an existing document — fix a typo, adjust a structure — what slows you down the most?
• Which markdown features feel powerful in theory but tedious in practice?
• Is there something a Word or Google Docs user can do that you wish you could do in markdown without leaving your editor?
• What's the smallest annoyance you've just gotten used to that you wish someone would fix?

Concrete examples beat abstract wishlists every time. A sentence about a real document you wrestled with last week is more useful to me than a long list of features. And I'm deliberately not telling you what I'm already considering — I'd rather hear what's actually on your mind, not what you think I want to hear.