WinMD

June 18, 2026 · View on GitHub

A lightweight Markdown editor and viewer for Windows — no MSIX, no Store, just a plain .exe.

Features

  • Editor with a formatting toolbar (bold, italic, headings, lists, links, code)
  • Live preview rendered by Markdig with a GitHub-style stylesheet (light / dark theme)
  • PDF export via WebView2
  • Find / Replace in the editor; find in the rendered preview (injected JS)
  • Undo / Redo with keystroke coalescing (600 ms debounce groups a typing burst into one history step)
  • File association — open .md files by double-clicking in Explorer
  • Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+N/O/S, Ctrl+P (PDF), Ctrl+B/I, Ctrl+E (toggle editor/preview), Ctrl+F/H, F3/Shift+F3, F1 (help)

Requirements

  • Windows 10 version 1903 (19041) or later — x64 or ARM64
  • Windows App SDK 1.8 — the installer downloads it automatically if missing

Installation

Download WinMD-Setup.exe from the latest release and run it.

Building from source

Prerequisites: .NET 10 SDK with the Windows workload.

dotnet build -c Debug -t:Run -f net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide (project layout, conventions, building an installer).

Architecture

WinUI 3 app (Windows App SDK 1.8), unpackaged .exe, MVVM pattern.

LayerDescription
MainWindow.xamlMain window — toolbar and editor/preview panel
HelpWindow.xamlHelp window with keyboard shortcut reference
ViewModels/EditorViewModel.csSingle ViewModel — all application state
Services/MarkdownService.csMarkdown → HTML conversion (Markdig + CSS template)
Platforms/Windows/WindowsFileService.csWinRT pickers + System.IO
Platforms/Windows/WindowsPdfExporter.csPDF export via WebView2
Models/MarkdownDocument.csDocument data carrier
Platforms/Windows/FileAssociation.cs.md file association registered in HKCU

Tech stack

License

MIT