Made by one person.

Imark is a Markdown reader for Mac that can also fix the file in front of you. Miguel Silva writes it and gives it away under the MIT licence. No company, no funding, no investors to answer to. This page says who is behind it, why it exists, and what it does not do.

macOS 14+ · 6.7 MB

Who writes it

Miguel Silva, a software developer, at github.com/migsilva89. He builds Imark, writes these pages, cuts the releases, and answers the issues. There is no team behind that and no support queue in front of it.

The work is in the open, which is the only credential that matters here: the commit history starts on 1 August 2026 and you can read every decision in it, including the ones that were reversed a day later. The changelog is the same story with the versions attached.

Miguel also builds Loadout, a Mac app for managing coding-agent skills and MCP servers, and Unbury, a Mac app for finding browser bookmarks by what their pages are about. They are separate apps; neither is required to use Imark.

Why it exists

It started with the smaller annoyance: macOS shows a .md file as raw text, so every README, plan, and set of notes on the machine looked like source code. Pressing the space bar in the Finder ought to show the document.

The real reason came three days later. A plan written by a coding agent is a Markdown file, and arguing with it in a chat window means describing where you disagree instead of pointing at it. So Imark puts the note in the margin, and keeps it inside the document as an HTML comment — which means the agent can read your notes straight back out of the file it gave you. No server, no port, nothing installed on the other side.

That is the whole idea, and it is the part of Imark its author uses every day. Annotating a document and the skill for Claude Code and Codex are the two guides that cover it.

How it is built

Swift and AppKit for the app, with the Quick Look extension sharing the same renderer, so a preview in the Finder and a window in the app show you the same document. The renderer bundles markdown-it, KaTeX, and Mermaid inside the app rather than loading them from a CDN, which is why diagrams and maths work on a plane.

Imark can check a signed update list once a day and download an update only after you choose Install and Relaunch. It sends no documents or identifiers. The privacy page explains what GitHub receives and how to turn off automatic checks.

What Imark is not

Version 0.6.5 today. The limits below are the current ones, and they are the answers to the questions people ask before downloading.

Mac only, and macOS 14 or later
There is no version for iPhone, iPad, Windows, or Linux, and none is planned. Imark is AppKit and the Quick Look extension is a macOS extension; neither travels.
Not a writing app
Imark opens as a reader. Click the pencil when you need to fix the file in front of you, then return to the rendered document. There is no library or formatting toolbar, and Open in hands larger changes to Cursor, VS Code, Zed, Sublime, Claude, or ChatGPT.
Not a notes app
No library, no vault, no tags, no sync, no accounts. Imark opens the files already on your disk and forgets them when you close the window.
Not in the Mac App Store
The disk image comes from GitHub, signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple. Homebrew installs the same app with brew install --cask migsilva89/imark/imark.
Not finished
Imark is before version 1.0. Features move, defaults change, and a release can land in a week or three weeks. One person decides, and that person also answers the issues.

About the guides

The guides on this site are written by the same person who wrote the app, against the version that is out. Each one shows the date it last changed, and where a guide compares Imark with something else, the claims come from the other app’s own pages — with any gap marked as unknown rather than filled in.

If a guide is wrong or out of date, that is a bug like any other. Say so in an issue.

Getting in touch

Open an issue for a bug, a question, or a feature you want. It is public on purpose: the answer stays where the next person can find it. Pull requests are welcome, and CONTRIBUTING.md says what is out of scope before you spend a weekend on it.

For anything that looks like a security problem, use a private security advisory instead of the issue tracker.

Written by Miguel Silva, who also writes the app.