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Yes. Simple .md is free, and requires macOS 13 or later.

No. There’s no account, no sign-in, and no analytics — nothing about you is collected at all.

Yes. Everything happens on your Mac; nothing about you, your machine, or your documents is gathered, transmitted, or stored anywhere else.

Simple .md has three: Paper, Crisp and Editorial. A theme changes the paper, the type and the window around them, and each has a light and a dark side that follows your Mac. Choose one from the Theme menu; hovering one shows a small sample beside the menu, and your document does not change until you choose.

A theme is yours, not the document’s. Choosing one changes nothing in your markdown file. It applies to every open window and to whatever you open next, and it is still your choice after you quit and come back. Exported HTML carries the theme’s paper and type. Like the app, it follows the reader’s light or dark setting, and the typeface falls back to a similar one where the theme’s font isn’t installed. A PDF is the rendered document on white paper, without the outline or toolbars.

An image beside your file — ![](images/chart.png) — sits in a folder Simple hasn't been given access to. The first time one fails to load, Simple asks once whether to show images from that folder. Choose Folder…, pick it, and Simple remembers, including after you quit. Choose Not Now and the images stay hidden in that window; click a missing image to be asked again.

Deliberate. Saving normalises the markdown: hand-wrapped lines are joined, table columns are padded to line up, and * bullets become -. Your words are unchanged. Saving a second time changes nothing further. If you keep files in git, expect one noisy diff the first time a document goes through the editor.

One change is easy to miss. A link written as [text][ref], with its address on its own line lower down, is saved with the address inside the link. The address lines themselves are kept, gathered at the end of the document, so a list of sources at the foot of a draft stays in your file. Tags you type by hand, such as an opening <u> or <span> with no closing tag, come back exactly as you wrote them; only a matched pair takes effect.

Underline and colour are two of the three exceptions to plain markdown; the properties card is the third. Markdown has no underline and no colour, so Simple writes them as HTML: a <u> tag and a <span>. It is still valid markdown and nothing will choke on it, but the styling may not survive elsewhere: GitHub keeps the words and drops inline colour, and converters targeting Word or PDF discard raw HTML rather than translating it. Everything else Simple writes is either ordinary markdown or a widely supported extension: callouts use GitHub’s alert syntax, and a code block’s title is written on its opening fence. If a document has to look the same everywhere, leave underline, colour and the properties card alone.

No. Simple does not read a theme: line: the window is in your theme, whatever the document says, and the line stays exactly where it is. Simple writes a tables: line into a document’s properties only when you choose a table format. Pressing the properties button on a document that has none starts an empty title: line for you to fill in.

Right-click any .md file in the Finder, choose Get Info, set “Open with” to Simple .md, then click Change All.

Yes. Click Aa or M↓ in the title bar, or press ⌥⌘S (View > Edit in Markdown) to switch between the markdown and the rendered text. Your cursor comes with you, to the same word, as long as it is on screen when you switch. The centre pane is the Editor, and it is what you type into in either view. Open the Viewer beside it and the other view sits there for looking at — it never accepts typing. The outline works the same in either view. Find works in both: it searches the markdown itself when you are in the markdown, and the words you see when you are in the rendered text. The formatting toolbar is for the rendered text.

Simple .md > About Simple .md. The app never checks for updates itself; instead the App Store tells you when one is ready, and installs it for you if you have automatic updates turned on.

Help > Simple .md Help, or ⌘?. It opens in a window of its own inside Simple, and the Help menu’s search field searches it.