Glyph

A small app for reading and editing markdown — Obsidian's live preview, without the vault. Native on macOS, Windows and Linux, and it can serve a folder of notes to your phone.

LLM workflows produce piles of .md files. Obsidian wants them moved into a vault before it treats them well; TextEdit shows you raw asterisks. Glyph is the missing middle: double-click any markdown file anywhere on disk and it opens instantly as a formatted, editable page.

One interface everywhere. Resources/viewer.html is the app — the renderer, the live editor and the serializer — and each platform is a thin native shell around it. That is also why it runs in a browser as a single self-contained file, and on a phone with no app to install.

• The formatted page is the editor. Click anywhere and type — formatting stays rendered while the file updates underneath (a DOM→markdown serializer writes your edits back continuously). No modes to think about.
• Markdown-as-you-type. ## starts a heading, - a list, - [ ] a checkbox, 1. a numbered list, > a quote; **bold**, *italic*, ==highlight==, ~~strike~~, and `code` convert as you close them.
• Obsidian-flavored rendering: callouts with icons and -/+ fold markers, [[wikilinks]], #tags (each picks its own color), YAML frontmatter as a Properties panel, ![[image]] embeds, checklists, tables you can type into.
• Color-coded hierarchy — H1 rose, H2 gold, H3 teal, H4 lavender — so long documents read like a map. Dark and light themes follow the system, or force either from View → Appearance.
• Tabs. Every file opens as a tab in one window, like a browser. Drag a tab out for a second window.
• A formatting toolbar above the page: undo/redo, headings, bold/italic/underline/strike/highlight, code, link, picture (copied next to the note so it travels with it), lists, checklist, quote, callout, table, code block, clear formatting.
• ⌘-click opens links in your browser; plain click places the cursor. ⌘E flips to the raw markdown text and back — and the raw view is a proper source editor: syntax coloring that uses the same palette as the formatted view (an H2 is gold in both), dimmed markers so you read the writing rather than the punctuation, and a line-number gutter.
• Copy as markdown. ⌘A selects the note, ⇧⌘C copies it — the selection if there is one, the whole note if there is not — as markdown, not as flattened text. A toolbar button copies the whole note in one click, which is the only way to do it on a phone.
• Word count, find (⌘F in raw mode), autosave with macOS version history, and pasted markdown formats itself.
• PDFs too, on the Mac. File → Open, Open With → Glyph, or drop one on the Dock icon: it opens as a tab beside your notes, read-only, through Apple's own PDFKit, so scans, text selection and links all work. Password-protected files ask for the password. Glyph doesn't take over double-clicking a PDF.
• And books. EPUBs open the same way: a chapter at a time, in your own type, with Contents, footnotes, and an Aa panel for size, font, spacing, margins, alignment and page color. Your place in each book is remembered. Copy-protected books aren't supported.

No Electron. The whole app is a few small source files; it compiles in seconds and launches instantly.

Build from source — needs only Apple's Command Line Tools (no Xcode):

git clone https://github.com/cvdvs/glyph-md.git
cd glyph-md
./build.sh
cp -R build/Glyph.app /Applications/

Open any .md with right-click → Open With → Glyph. To make Glyph the default app for markdown files:

clang -fobjc-arc Scripts/set-default-md.m -o /tmp/glyph-default -framework Cocoa -framework UniformTypeIdentifiers && /tmp/glyph-default

Glyph also registers for .txt, so it shows up under right-click → Open With straight away. To make it the default for text files, macOS 26 requires you to do it yourself (an app is no longer allowed to claim a built-in type): right-click any .txt → Get Info → under "Open with" choose Glyph → Change All…. .csv, .json and source files carry their own types and are unaffected.

Requires macOS 13+. Uninstall by deleting /Applications/Glyph.app.

There is a native build for both. It is the same editor — the interface is one shared file that all three builds render — wrapped in a small native shell that owns the window, the files and the dialogs.

Windows needs the Build Tools for Visual Studio with the C++ workload, and Python 3:

git clone https://github.com/cvdvs/glyph-md.git
cd glyph-md
./shell/build-portable.ps1

That produces shell\build\glyph.exe. The Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime is already on Windows 11 and most Windows 10 machines; if it is missing, Glyph says so and links to it.

Linux needs WebKitGTK:

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev
git clone https://github.com/cvdvs/glyph-md.git
cd glyph-md
./shell/build-portable.sh

That produces shell/build/glyph. A .deb is built in CI and attached to each run, and registers Glyph for markdown files.

Either build can check itself:

./shell/build/glyph --selftest

It renders the real fixtures, runs the same three assertion suites the Mac app runs, and compares the markdown it writes back byte-for-byte against the expected output. See docs/cross-platform.md for how the shell works and what is known not to work yet.

There is also a single HTML file that runs the same editor in any browser: tabs, the formatting toolbar, open and save, raw markdown view, light and dark. Nothing to install, no server, no network — the whole app is one self-contained file.

Grab glyph.html from the latest release and open it, or build it yourself:

python3 Scripts/make-preview.py sample.md glyph.html --chrome

In Chrome and Edge it saves straight back to the file you opened. Safari and Firefox lack that browser API, so saving downloads the file instead. Pictures are embedded in the document rather than copied next to it, since a web page cannot write files beside your note.

Run a small server on the machine that holds your notes — a Mac mini, a laptop that stays on — pointed at a folder of .md files:

node server/glyph-server.mjs ~/Documents/drafts

It prints a link carrying a token. Open it once on your phone (same wifi) and it pairs. You get the full Glyph editor plus a folder tree of the notes it serves — collapsible, filterable, remembering what you left open. Open a draft, read it, edit it — every change saves straight back to the file on the computer. There is only one copy of each file, so it is genuinely live and there is nothing to sync and no conflict to untangle; close the phone and the edit is already on disk.

Add it to your home screen (iOS: Share → Add to Home Screen) and it opens full-screen with its own icon and no browser chrome: touch targets sized to 44pt, the toolbar padded for the notch, and a text-size control for reading in bed.

PDFs open too. Drop one in the folder and it shows up in the file list and opens in a tab, every page, scans included, read-only. The reader is PDF.js (Apache 2.0, license), vendored for the phone server only, so the desktop apps stay dependency-free. EPUB books work too, with the same reader as the Mac app and nothing to install.

Node standard library only — nothing to npm install — and a vendored copy of PDF.js for PDFs. Security: every request needs the token, a request can never read or write outside the served folder, an unsaved edit is kept on the phone and retried if the connection drops, and a file changed on the computer meanwhile is never silently overwritten. Keep it on your home network and do not port-forward it; for access from anywhere, put both devices on Tailscale (free, encrypted, private — only your own devices) and use the Tailscale address, which the server prints for you.

It can also start at login and restart itself, so there is no window to keep open. See docs/mobile.md for that, for Tailscale, and for why the always-on route needs one macOS permission.

Glyph opens .txt, .text and .log as plain text: no markdown formatting, no syntax colouring, and saved back exactly as typed — byte for byte. The formatted view tidies markdown as you edit (bullet markers, spacing), which is right for a .md and wrong for a file that has to come back unchanged, so it stays off for plain text. Rename a file to .md if you want it formatted.

Two layers, deliberately simple:

• Native shell — Objective-C + AppKit (Sources/): a document-based app providing the window, tabs, toolbar, autosave, and Open Recent. Off macOS the same chrome is provided by an optional in-page layer in viewer.html, gated on window.__glyphChrome so the Mac app never sees it. Objective-C so the whole thing builds with clang and the stock SDK — no Xcode, no package manager, no dependencies to install. The raw editor's source coloring lives in GlyphHighlighter with the palette in GlyphTheme (the same values as the CSS, so the two views agree) and line numbers in GlyphGutter.
• The page — one WKWebView rendering Resources/viewer.html: the entire UI (CSS + JS) in a single file. marked.js (MIT, vendored) parses markdown; a custom layer adds the Obsidian extras; the editing layer makes the rendered DOM contenteditable and serializes it back to markdown as you type.

sample.md doubles as the feature checklist — open it in Glyph to see everything render.

All visual and editing behavior lives in Resources/viewer.html. Preview changes without rebuilding:

python3 Scripts/make-preview.py sample.md /tmp/preview.html

and open that in a browser. Three headless harnesses guard the behavior, and CI runs all of them on every push:

Rebuild and reinstall with ./build.sh + copy to /Applications (quit Glyph first).

• Editing in the formatted view lightly normalizes a file's markdown on first edit (bullet markers, spacing) — content is preserved, formatting is tidied. Plain text files are exempt: they come back byte for byte.
• Link URLs and frontmatter are edited in raw mode (⌘E).
• The app is unsigned — you build it yourself, so Gatekeeper has nothing to complain about.
• The phone server is a live window onto the computer, not a sync: it needs to reach that machine, so there is no offline editing away from it.
• The macOS build of the portable shell exists so the Windows/Linux interface can be checked on a Mac. It has no native file dialogs — pass a file on the command line. The real Mac app is the AppKit one.
• Documents past 300KB open as plain text rather than a formatted page, because rendering them live is slower than it is useful.

MIT. Markdown parsing by marked (MIT). Built by Claudia Vaduvescu (GOODGLYPH), with Claude Code.