MarkdownBlaze

A fast, offline Markdown viewer — and the rare one that prints properly. Point it at a .md file and it renders a clean, navigable document, lays it onto paper the way it will actually print, and lets you pick how that paper should look. No Electron, no network access, no telemetry: a native OS WebView driven by Photino + Blazor and Microsoft Fluent UI on .NET 10.

📖 The docs/ folder is a self-contained sample wiki that doubles as a feature tour. Open it with MarkdownBlaze docs/.

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Features

The document, your way

• Eleven document themes — Book, Classic, Elegant, Newspaper, Academic, Report, Modern, Simple, Writer, Typewriter and Night, plus Follow app theme. Each changes the paper colour, the typeface and the spacing of the document only: the toolbar and sidebar keep the appearance you chose. Pick one from the toolbar or step through them with F9.
• Two views — Continuous, one column that scrolls, and Pages, the document laid onto A4 sheets with real print margins and page breaks, fitted either to the pane's width or to a whole sheet. F2 cycles. Page view is a live preview of the printed result.
• Zoom the document, not the app — Ctrl + wheel, Ctrl + / Ctrl -, a trackpad pinch, or the toolbar's − 100% + ↺. The window itself never scales, so the interface stays where you put it.
• Nothing scrolls sideways — long code wraps, diagrams scale to the column, wide tables fit the sheet.

Printing

• Ctrl + P opens a bar along the bottom to choose the theme for that one print; the document changes as you look at it, so you see what the printer will produce. Ctrl + P again sends it.
• Only the document is printed — no toolbar, no sidebar, no menus — always in a light palette, with syntax highlighting and Mermaid diagrams re-drawn to match rather than dumped as dark blocks.
• Code wraps, diagrams scale and tables shrink to the sheet, because paper cannot be scrolled.

Navigating

• Folder tree — the sidebar's Headers tab shows the folder you are reading, with other folders and documents closed and the current document expanded to its own headings. One tree for moving between files and within one.
• The folder you point at is the root. Open a file and you get its folder; open a folder and it reads that folder's index, main or readme, else the first document alphabetically. Following a link never moves the root.
• History that keeps its order — entries stay where you last saw them instead of jumping to the top when reopened. Right-click for Open, Open in new window, Copy filename, Open containing folder.
• Smart link rewriting relative to the opened file: extension-less links and [[wiki links]] get .md; folder links resolve to index.md. Local links open in-app, external ones in your browser.
• Auto-refresh — edit the file and the view reloads, keeping your place.

Rendering

• CommonMark + extensions via Markdig: tables, task lists, footnotes, definition lists, auto-identifiers, ==highlight==, ~~strikethrough~~, sub/superscript.
• Syntax highlighting with a bundled highlight.js (~190 languages), following the document's theme rather than the app's.
• Math via bundled KaTeX — inline $…$, display $$…$$, ```math blocks.
• Mermaid diagrams, re-drawn whenever the document's theme changes so they never sit dark on a light page.
• Admonitions / callouts in Docusaurus (:::tip), MkDocs (!!! note) and GitHub/Obsidian (> [!note], collapsible > [!tip]-) syntaxes.
• Emoji shortcodes, YAML front matter parsed and hidden, local images inlined as data URIs.

Obsidian / GitHub flavour

• Wiki links — [[Page]], [[Page|alias]], [[Page#Heading]] navigate in-app; ![[img.png]] inlines; ![[Note]] becomes a link.
• Tags — #project, #todo/study render as pills (C# and #123 are correctly ignored).
• Comments — Obsidian %%…%%, inline and fenced, are hidden.

Rendering comes from the standalone bwets.Markdig.Extensions package.

Fitting into the desktop

• Explorer right-click — Open with MarkdownBlaze on Markdown files and on folders.
• markdown:// links — the address of the document you are reading is a working link, so anything that can open a URL can hand a document over: markdown://C:/notes/Report.md.
• Both register themselves on first run under HKEY_CURRENT_USER — no elevation, nothing to switch on — and repair themselves if the app moves. Linux and macOS packages register the handler through the .desktop entry and Info.plist.
• Remembers window size, position, maximized state, sidebar width, view, theme and zoom.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Alt + ← / Alt + →	Back / Forward
Ctrl + O / Ctrl + Shift + O	Open a file / a folder
F2 / Shift + F2	Next / previous view
F9 / Shift + F9	Next / previous document theme
Ctrl + wheel, Ctrl + / Ctrl -	Zoom the document (Ctrl 0 resets)
Ctrl + P	Print — once to choose a theme, again to print
F5 / Ctrl + R	Refresh
Ctrl + B / F1	Toggle sidebar
F11	Fullscreen (Esc leaves it)
?	All shortcuts

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Getting started

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK
• Windows: the WebView2 Runtime (preinstalled on current Windows)
• Linux: WebKitGTK + GTK — webkit2gtk-4.1 and gtk3 (Arch/CachyOS: sudo pacman -S --needed gtk3 webkit2gtk-4.1 dbus)

Build & run

dotnet run --project src/MarkdownBlaze -- "docs/index.md"   # a file
dotnet run --project src/MarkdownBlaze -- "docs"            # or a whole folder

Releases & packaging

Prebuilt, self-contained binaries (Windows zip/installer/MSIX, Linux tar.gz/.deb/.pkg.tar.zst, macOS .dmg) come from the manual release workflow. On Linux, packaging/linux/install-linux.sh installs the .desktop entry and registers MarkdownBlaze for .md files and markdown:// links.

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Tech stack

• .NET 10, PhotinoX.Blazor 5 (native OS WebView host), Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor
• Markdig + bwets.Markdig.Extensions for Markdown → HTML
• highlight.js, Mermaid and KaTeX, all bundled for offline use

Project layout

docs/                       Sample wiki / feature showcase
src/
  MarkdownBlaze/
    Program.cs              Photino + Blazor host, markdown:// scheme, shell integration
    App.razor               Root (app theme, view switch)
    ViewerView.razor        Toolbar, folder tree, print bar, view modes, zoom
    SettingsView.razor      Settings page
    Services/
      MarkdownService       Markdown → HTML, startup file/folder resolution
      NavigationService     Current document, back/forward, links, file watching
      FileTreeService       The folder being read, as a lazily-read tree
      ContentThemes         The document themes and their light/dark character
      ViewModes             Continuous vs page view
      ShellIntegration      Explorer verbs and the markdown:// handler
      UriScheme             markdown:// addresses, both directions
      HistoryStore          Persisted history, order preserved
    wwwroot/
      app.css / app.js      Shell styling, pagination, zoom, printing, theming
      lib/                  Offline highlight.js, Mermaid, KaTeX, document themes
packaging/                  Linux .desktop/.deb/PKGBUILD, Windows installer/MSIX, macOS .app/.dmg

License

Personal project — all rights reserved unless stated otherwise.