MarkdownView

A pure UIKit/AppKit framework for rendering Markdown with real-time parsing and rendering. Battle tested in FlowDown.

Important

MarkdownView is not a full-spec CommonMark renderer. It deliberately trades spec completeness for the best possible typography and layout on phone-sized screens: complex elements (tables, code blocks) are lifted out of lists and rendered as first-class blocks, line spacing and fonts follow platform text styles, and rendering stays smooth while streaming tokens from an LLM. If you need byte-exact CommonMark output, use a spec-focused renderer instead.

Preview

Features

• 🚀 Real-time Rendering: designed for streaming — updates are throttled and views are reused, so calling it on every token is fine
• 📱 Mobile-first Layout: complex elements are extracted from lists and laid out for readability on small screens
• 🎨 Syntax Highlighting: code blocks highlighted asynchronously with Highlightr
• 📊 Math Rendering: LaTeX formulas rendered with SwiftMath, with tap-to-preview
• 🖥️ Cross-Platform: native iOS, macOS, Mac Catalyst, visionOS, and watchOS (via WatchMarkdownView)

Supported Markdown

GitHub-flavored basics: headings, paragraphs, emphasis, lists (ordered/unordered/task), blockquotes, fenced code blocks, tables, links, images-as-links, inline and block math ($...$, $$...$$). HTML blocks and other long-tail CommonMark constructs are rendered as plain text or simplified — by design.

Installation

Add the following to your Package.swift file:

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/Lakr233/MarkdownView", from: "4.1.0"),
]

Platform compatibility:

• iOS 16.0+
• macOS 13.0+
• Mac Catalyst 16.0+
• visionOS 1.0+
• watchOS 8.0+ (WatchMarkdownView product)

Usage

SwiftUI

import MarkdownView

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        MarkdownView("# Hello World")
    }
}

With custom theme:

MarkdownView("# Hello World", theme: .default)

UIKit / AppKit

One-shot rendering:

import MarkdownView

let markdownTextView = MarkdownTextView()
markdownTextView.setMarkdown("# Hello World")

Streaming (parse off the main path you control, display throttled):

import MarkdownView
import MarkdownParser

let markdownTextView = MarkdownTextView()

// on every incoming chunk:
let result = MarkdownParser().parse(accumulatedText)
let content = MarkdownContent(parserResult: result, theme: .default)
markdownTextView.setContent(content) // coalesced by throttleInterval (default 20 fps)

Immediate, unthrottled replacement:

markdownTextView.setContentImmediately(content)

watchOS

import WatchMarkdownView

WatchMarkdownView(markdown: "# Hello World")

Migrating to 4.0

MarkdownView 4.0 adopts Litext 2.0 and renames the core API. Deprecated shims are provided for one release:

3.x	4.0
MarkdownTextView.PreprocessedContent	MarkdownContent
setMarkdown(_: PreprocessedContent)	setContent(_:)
setMarkdownManually(_:)	setContentImmediately(_:)
bindContentOffset(from:)	trackedScrollView = ...
markdownTextView.textView	markdownTextView.textLabelView
ParseResult.render(theme:) (two overloads)	renderedContent(theme:) / highlightMaps(theme:)

New: setMarkdown(_ text: String) parses and displays a markdown string in one call; MarkdownContent(markdown:theme:locale:) does the same for content objects.

Example

Check out the included example project to see MarkdownView in action:

open Example.xcworkspace

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

This project includes code adapted from swift-markdown-ui by Guillermo Gonzalez, used under the MIT License.

Sponsor

LookInside helps you inspect a running iOS or macOS app UI from your Mac.

---

Copyright 2025 © Lakr Aream. All rights reserved.