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MDViewer on a tablet. Everything below was found by running it on a Plasma tablet with a finger, not by reasoning about one.
Downloads
Pick the one for your machine — each bundles JavaFX, which ships compiled libraries per platform, so they are not interchangeable.
| Your machine | Download |
|---|---|
| Windows | mdviewer-1.1.0-win.zip |
| Linux, Intel or AMD 64-bit | mdviewer-1.1.0-linux.zip |
| Linux on ARM (Raspberry Pi) | mdviewer-1.1.0-linux-aarch64.zip |
| macOS, Apple silicon (M1+) | mdviewer-1.1.0-mac-aarch64.zip |
| macOS, Intel | mdviewer-1.1.0-mac.zip |
Needs Java 21 or newer. Unzip and run the launcher:
./run.sh # Linux and macOS
run.bat # Windows
The launcher is new, and it is the recommended way in: it selects the X11 backend on Linux, where JavaFX has no Wayland backend and may otherwise never show a window, and it quiets two JVM warnings that come from JavaFX rather than from this application. java -jar mdviewer-1.1.0.jar still works if you prefer.
Touch
Settings → Display Size — Tablet, Regular, or Extra Large. Scales type, row heights, hit targets, the menus, the dialogs and the rendered document together. Defaults to Tablet when the machine has a touchscreen.
Settings → Touch Mode — the gestures a touchscreen has and a mouse does not:
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Drag | Scrolls the document |
| Press and hold | Opens the context menu a right click would |
| Double tap, hold, drag | Selects across lines |
| One tap in the file tree | Opens that file |
None of these existed before, because X11 reports a touchscreen as an ordinary pointer: JavaFX never sees a touch, so it never synthesises a scroll and never offers a right click. A drag selected text and nothing moved.
On-screen keyboard. It is asked for when you tap into any text field, and the window moves above it — neither of which the toolkit does, because JavaFX takes no part in the input-method protocol and the compositor is therefore never told a text field exists. Configurable in ~/.mdviewer/ui.properties: keyboardShowCommand defaults to vkbd --show, and keyboardSummon=never switches the whole thing off. It only engages on a machine with a touchscreen and no keyboard attached — a tablet in a keyboard case is a laptop.
Also in this release
- Paste a screenshot straight into a document. It is written to an
assets/folder beside the file. An unsaved document now offers to save itself first rather than refusing quietly. - Per-platform downloads. 1.0.0 shipped one jar containing Windows native libraries to everybody; on Linux and macOS it failed with
Error initializing QuantumRenderer: no suitable pipeline found, which names graphics pipelines and not the cause. If that is what brought you here, this is the fix. - Larger, centred file-tree rows and folder arrows; a split divider a finger can find, which colours while you drag it; the assistant panel opens wide enough to read and shows symbols rather than four buttons each ellipsised to
....
Upgrading from 1.0.0
Nothing to migrate. Settings live in ~/.mdviewer/ and are unchanged; documents are ordinary Markdown files.
If you are on Linux and 1.0.0 never started, that was the packaging fault above, not your machine. Take the download matching your architecture and it will run.