mdlite: Less, please, this time

A while ago I proudly presented my Markdown editor mark  here. It can do a lot. As I’ve since learned, it can do too much.

GitHub integration? Never needed. Offline mode as a PWA? Sounded great, but mainly meant the editor cached itself so stubbornly that I had to add a dedicated menu item just to force updates. A help-menu entry explaining how to update the app – that’s the point where you should start wondering. Add CodeMirror with 30+ themes, PDF and docx export, a Markdown linter. All solidly built. All unused.

The lesson: I had been addressing needs that didn’t exist.

So, a fresh start. mdlite  does exactly what I actually need when writing: type Markdown on the left, live preview on the right. Tabs you can rename with a double click. A small frontmatter editor. Save and open as .md, export as HTML – done. No login, no server, everything stays in your browser and is still there on your next visit.

The whole thing is about 29 kB of JavaScript, built with Claude from a Claude Design handoff. The code is on GitHub .

Give it a try: mdlite.martuni.de  – and if you find a feature missing: maybe that’s intentional. 😉