mdread

A quiet reading room for your markdown. Drop a file or a whole folder, read it beautifully, edit it in place, and download it — all in the browser. Local-first: your files never leave your device. Deploys to Cloudflare in one command.

🔗 Live: mdread.app · MIT licensed · no backend · no tracking

What it does

• 📂 Open a folder or files — via the native file picker, or just drag & drop anything onto the page (a single .md, a stack of files, or an entire folder tree).
• 📖 Read — typography tuned for hours of long-form reading, using your OS's native reading serif (New York on Apple, Georgia elsewhere — no web fonts to download): comfortable measure and leading, oldstyle figures, a table of contents with scroll-spy, and a reading-progress bar.
• ✍️ Edit — Read / Split / Edit views. On Chrome & Edge, Save writes straight back to the original file on disk (File System Access API). Elsewhere it downloads.
• ⬇️ Download any document as a clean .md.
• 🎨 Day / Sepia / Night themes, adjustable text size, line width, typeface, and an optional drop cap.
• 🔌 Offline — installable PWA; the app shell is cached, so it works with no network.
• 🧠 Remembers your last folder, your last document, your reading position, and your preferences across visits.

Everything is static HTML/CSS/JS with three small vendored libraries (marked, DOMPurify, highlight.js) and system fonts only — no external requests at all. No build step.

Run locally

Any static file server works. The simplest:

npm run serve        # python3 -m http.server on :8787, serving ./public

…then open http://localhost:8787. Or, with Wrangler (mirrors production):

npm install
npm run dev          # wrangler dev

Note on editing: live "save to disk" needs the File System Access API (Chrome/Edge, and over http://localhost or HTTPS). In other browsers files open read-only and edits download as new files. Reading works everywhere.

Deploy to Cloudflare

Two ways — pick one.

Workers (recommended, uses wrangler.jsonc)

npm install
npx wrangler login
npm run deploy       # wrangler deploy → serves ./public from Workers Assets

Cloudflare Pages

npx wrangler pages deploy public --project-name markread

…or in the Cloudflare dashboard: Pages → Create → Direct upload, and drag in the public/ folder. No build command, output directory public.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
⌘/Ctrl + O	Open folder
⌘/Ctrl + S	Save (to disk, or download)
⌘/Ctrl + E	Toggle edit
⌘/Ctrl + \	Toggle sidebar
t	Toggle table of contents
f	Focus mode
/	Search files
Esc	Exit focus / close popover

Project layout

public/
  index.html      app shell
  styles.css      the design (three themes, typography, layout)
  app.js          all logic: files, rendering, editing, persistence
  sw.js           service worker (offline)
  manifest.webmanifest
  icons/icon.svg
  vendor/         marked · DOMPurify · highlight.js (vendored for offline)
wrangler.jsonc    Cloudflare Workers Assets config

Privacy

There is no server, no analytics, and no external requests — not even web fonts (the app uses your operating system's native fonts). Files are read in your browser; the only persistence is local (IndexedDB stores folder handles so they can be reopened; localStorage stores preferences and reading positions).

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. The whole app is three files in public/ — index.html, styles.css, app.js — with no build step, so you can edit and refresh.

License

MIT © techjewel