rustdown

A fast, native Markdown editor built in Rust.

✨ Features

🖊️ Edit · Preview · Side-by-side — three modes, one keystroke to switch
🎨 Syntax highlighting — headings, code fences, bold, links, and more
📑 Navigation panel — jump to any heading instantly
🔍 Find & Replace — search across your document
📝 Format on demand — respects .editorconfig (trailing whitespace, final newline, line endings)
👁️ Live preview — full GFM rendering with tables, task lists, strikethrough, and images
⚡ Fast — native GPU-accelerated UI, instant startup, zero Electron
🔄 Live reload — detects external file changes with 3-way merge for dirty buffers
💾 Remembers your preferences — zoom, mode, nav panel, and heading colours persist across sessions
🖱️ Drag & drop — open .md files by dropping them in

📦 Install

From crates.io

cargo install rustdown-app

The binary installs as rustdown.

Pre-built binary

Download a pre-built binary from Releases.

Build from source

cargo install --git https://github.com/teh-hippo/rustdown.git rustdown-app

Linux runtime dependencies

Most desktop environments already have these. Minimal installs (including WSL) may need:

sudo apt-get install libwayland-client0 libxkbcommon0 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libgtk-3-0

🚀 Usage

rustdown                    # new document
rustdown README.md          # open a file (starts in Preview mode)
rustdown -s README.md       # open in Side-by-side mode
rustdown -p                 # start in Preview mode

⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts

Ctrl on Linux/Windows, Cmd on macOS.

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+O	Open
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save As
Ctrl+N	New document
Ctrl+F	Find
Ctrl+Shift+F	Find & Replace
Ctrl+Alt+F	Format
Ctrl+Enter	Cycle mode
Ctrl+Shift+T	Toggle nav panel
Ctrl+Plus/Minus	Zoom
Ctrl+Shift+F11	Open demo document
Ctrl+Shift+F12	Open verification document

🖥️ Platforms

Platform	Architecture	Status
Linux	x86_64	✅ CI
Windows	x86_64	✅ CI

License

MIT

Bundled fonts are licensed separately — see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.