v0.1.0

Peekdown v0.1.0 — First Release 🎉

Peekdown is a lightweight, native Markdown viewer, built from scratch with Rust and the GPUI rendering framework. Designed for a distraction-free reading experience, it opens Markdown files in under one second — no Electron overhead, no waiting.

This initial release delivers a polished, tabbed Markdown IDE experience with single-instance workflow, GFM rendering, syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, embedded HTML, and full-text search.

✨ Highlights

• Instant cold startup — open .md files in under one second, every time.
• Single-instance + tabs — double-click any .md file to open it as a new tab in the already-running window via Windows named pipes.
• Full GFM rendering — tables, task lists, fenced code blocks, strikethrough, and embedded HTML, all rendered natively.
• Code + Mermaid — syntax highlighting for 300+ languages via syntect, plus Mermaid flowchart and sequence diagram rendering pulled from code blocks.
• Smart sidebars — outline (heading navigation) and file explorer (browse the current directory or project root) for fast navigation.
• Configurable appearance — light / dark / system theme, custom fonts, centered or full-width layout, inertia scrolling, and persistent window state.

🚀 Features

Rendering

• Full GitHub Flavored Markdown — tables, task lists, fenced code blocks, strikethrough, and inline HTML — parsed by pulldown-cmark.
• Code syntax highlighting for 300+ languages via syntect, with configurable theme support.
• Mermaid diagram rendering — render mermaid code blocks as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and more using a native Rust library.
• Embedded HTML support — <details>, <img>, <kbd>, and other inline HTML tags handled via html5ever.
• YAML frontmatter extracted and displayed as an interactive property table.
• Local image display with relative path resolution.

Navigation & Workflow

• Single-instance IPC — opening a .md file always lands in the same window as a new tab, using Windows named pipes.
• Tabbed multi-document interface — open, switch, and close tabs with keyboard shortcuts and tab tooltips.
• Outline sidebar — navigate between headings with a structured table of contents.
• File explorer sidebar — browse Markdown files in the current directory or project root, with sorting by name and modification time. Multi-root support included.
• In-document search — regex-enabled search with match highlighting and auto-scroll to the first result.
• File watcher auto-refresh — watch files for external changes and reload automatically.

Experience

• Inertia (physics-based) smooth scrolling — configurable speed and toggle.
• Appearance settings — light / dark / system theme, custom font family and size, mono font, centered or full-width layout, persistent window size.
• Keyboard shortcuts — Ctrl+O open, Ctrl+F search, Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab tab switching, Ctrl+W close tab, Ctrl++/Ctrl+-/Ctrl+0 font zoom, Ctrl+R refresh, Home/End scroll to top/bottom.
• Context menu & text selection — right-click context menus and mouse-based text selection in rendered documents.
• GPUI-native scrollbar — custom scrollbar positioned at the window edge with smooth performance.
• Window state persistence — remember window dimensions, sidebar visibility, and zoom level across sessions.
• Welcome screen — a welcoming open-file button when no document is loaded.

Platform

• Windows file association — run peekdown.exe --register to register Peekdown as the default handler for .md files (creates HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes entries).
• TOML configuration — user settings stored in the platform config directory (%APPDATA%\peekdown\config.toml on Windows).

📥 Installation

Download

Grab the prebuilt binary from the Releases page and run peekdown.exe --register (as Administrator) to associate .md files with Peekdown.

Build from source

# Requirements: Rust toolchain (latest stable) + Windows
git clone https://github.com/windedge/peekdown.git
cd peekdown
cargo build --release

The executable will be located at target/release/peekdown.exe.

# Optional: register file association
cargo run --release -- --register

⚠️ Known Limitations

• Windows-only — Peekdown currently supports Windows only. macOS and Linux support is planned.
• IPC is Windows-tuned — the single-instance mechanism uses Windows named pipes. A Unix socket equivalent is pending cross-platform work.
• File association is Windows-specific — the --register command creates Windows registry entries. No equivalent exists yet for macOS or Linux.
• Planned features not yet implemented — anchor/heading links, PDF/HTML export, and other roadmap items are not yet available. See the README for details.

📄 Full Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.