PicaMD

A small, native Markdown editor and viewer for macOS.

Open a .md file and it reads like a finished document. Put the cursor on a line and that line turns back into Markdown; move on and it renders again. Your files stay plain text wherever you keep them. No library, no vault, no account. Built with AppKit, not a web view.

Features

• Live preview in place. **, _, `, #, >, links and the like hide when the cursor isn't on them.
• Rendered blocks. Tables, images, math (KaTeX, bundled) and Mermaid diagrams render inline.
• Task lists with clickable checkboxes.
• Format menu for headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, code, links, checklists, quotes and tables, each a toggle on the selection or the word at the caret. Shortcuts can be changed in keybindings.json.
• Outline sidebar, an inspector with editable front matter (title, tags, date) and document statistics (⌥⌘I), a quiet word count, footnote previews. Front matter collapses to one grey line until the caret enters it.
• Find & Replace (⌘F) in a bar under the toolbar, with Wrap Around, Starts With / Whole Word, regular expressions and an option to ignore formatting so bold word also finds **bold** word.
• Focus, typewriter and reflow modes, tabs, and a command palette (⇧⌘P) for headings, the View and Format commands, Find, Export, Settings and, while AI is on, the AI presets.
• Themes. Three presets, four palettes plus your own text and background colour, seven accent colours, any installed font, and a readable line width. The editor's colours work independently of the system's light/dark setting.
• Export to HTML. PDF, DOCX and EPUB also work if pandoc is installed.
• Spotlight and Services. Find your notes in Spotlight, and use Open Selection in PicaMD from other apps. A Quick Look extension is included but loads only once the app is signed with a Developer ID (see Known limitations).

Optional extras

These are off until you turn them on, and stay out of the way otherwise.

• AI presets. Send a selection to Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple Intelligence or your own OpenAI-compatible server (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, on this Mac or another one) with ⌃⌘1–⌃⌘9, or pick a preset with ⌃Space. Presets are editable. API keys are kept in the Keychain. Apple Intelligence runs on the Mac without a key; its context window is small, so a long selection is refused before anything runs, with a pointer to Anthropic or OpenAI.

• MCP server. The app bundle includes picamd-mcp, which lets Claude Code or any other MCP client read and edit the documents you have open:

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "picamd": {
        "command": "/Applications/PicaMD.app/Contents/Resources/picamd-mcp"
      }
    }
  }
  

Install

PicaMD requires macOS 27 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon. The Apple Intelligence provider also needs Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings; the other providers don't.

1. Download the latest PicaMD-<version>.zip from Releases and move PicaMD.app to /Applications.
2. PicaMD isn't notarized yet, so macOS blocks the first launch. Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway next to the message about PicaMD and confirm. Or remove the quarantine flag before the first launch:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/PicaMD.app
   

Updates arrive through Sparkle.

Build from source

You need Xcode 27 or later and XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/michiwickman/picamd.git
cd picamd
./build.sh              # build and install to /Applications
INSTALL=0 ./build.sh    # build only
./release.sh            # → dist/PicaMD-<version>.zip (writes the build number into project.yml)

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