Made by one person.
Imark is a Markdown reader for Mac, written by Miguel Silva and given away under the MIT licence. No company, no funding, no investors to answer to. This page says who is behind it, the problem it was built for, and what it does not do.
macOS 14+ · 6.0 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.
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 makes one network request — a version check you can turn off — and sends nothing about you or your files. The privacy page names it, with a link to the file that does it.
What Imark is not
Version 0.3.0 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 an editor
- Imark reads. There is no writing surface and no formatting toolbar. Comments are the one thing it writes into a document, and the Open in button hands the file to Cursor, VS Code, Sublime, Zed, or whatever else you have.
- 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 works too, through a tap.
- 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.