MarkPaste

A fast, no-fuss Markdown editor with live preview — and a one-click Copy to Clipboard that turns your Markdown into rich, formatted text you can paste straight into Word, Outlook, Gmail, or Slack.

Write in Markdown, click Copy, paste anywhere as proper formatted content. No conversion, no cleanup.

Use it online

👉 markpaste.com — nothing to install. Everything runs in your browser; no files are uploaded anywhere. On the web, Save downloads a .md file (there's no server touching your disk).

Want to open and save .md files directly on disk? Run it locally — see below.

Features

• Live preview — Markdown rendered as you type (powered by markdown-it)
• One-click Copy to Clipboard — copies rich text/html (formatted) and text/plain, so it pastes cleanly into Word, email, and chat apps
• Editor / Split / Preview view modes
• Formatting toolbar + keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I / Ctrl+S)
• Export to HTML, Word (.doc), and PDF
• Drag & drop a .md file to open
• Dark / Light theme
• Open and save local .md files (when run locally, see below)

Run locally

Requires Node.js.

npm install
npm start

Then open http://localhost:3000.

MarkPaste is backend-optional: the frontend probes /api/health at startup. With the local server running it enables Local mode (open/save/refresh files directly on disk, plus the ?file= URL parameter). Served as a plain static site (like markpaste.com), the probe fails and it runs in Web mode (Save downloads a .md, Refresh is hidden, ?file= is ignored) — the same code, no server required.

The local server lets you read and write .md files on disk and binds to 127.0.0.1 so it is not reachable from the network. It is intended for local use only — do not expose it to the public internet. If you must self-host it on a reachable host, set the MD_BASE_DIR environment variable to confine all file access to a single directory:

MD_BASE_DIR=/path/to/notes npm start

Tech stack

• Backend: Node.js + Express (static file serving + local file read/write)
• Frontend: vanilla HTML / CSS / JS, no bundler
• Libraries (via CDN): markdown-it, html2canvas, jsPDF

Optional: Windows right-click integration

The add-context-menu.reg / remove-context-menu.reg, open-md.ps1, and start-hidden.vbs files set up a Windows right-click "open .md in MarkPaste" context menu. These are optional and Windows-only.

License

MIT © tokicode