Marked 3 Is the Markdown Companion a Lot of Mac Writers Have Been Waiting For

Brett Terpstra has released Marked 3, and this is not just a routine update. It’s one of those releases that makes you stop and think about where a tool actually fits in your workflow. If you write in Markdown on a Mac, there’s a very good chance Marked has been the missing piece all along.

For years, I lived in Microsoft Word for anything that wasn’t email. That was the EdTech world: Word was the standard, `.doc` and `.docx` were the expected formats, and no one wanted to hear about alternatives. Never mind the huge app footprint, the licensing mess, the cost, or the absurdity of the entire Office suite when all you really needed was a word processor.

And whenever someone in tech tried to suggest something leaner — OpenOffice, Google Docs, anything that didn’t come with Microsoft baggage — the pushback was immediate and emotional. In 2015, we were literally one day away from canceling our Microsoft contract when the superintendent made a late-afternoon phone call to my boss with a $100K purchase order to renew. That was the kind of environment it was.

So yes, I value the freedom to choose my own tools now.

Plain text has become the backbone of the way I work. Obsidian handles notes and longer writing. Drafts is where quick capture happens. Blogging tools and publishing platforms fill in the rest. Markdown wasn’t hard to learn, and once it clicks, it’s hard to go back. But Markdown has one weakness: the writing experience is only as good as the tools around it.

That’s where Marked comes in.

Marked Defined

Marked is not an editor. That’s the first thing to understand. It works alongside your editor, taking Markdown and rendering it live so you can actually see what your writing looks like without breaking your flow.

It also works with HTML and OPML files, which makes it more flexible than a lot of people realize. And beyond rendering, Marked can convert documents to PDF, HTML, DOCX, and RTF. It also brings prose analysis, syntax checking, and integration with all sorts of writing and outlining apps.

Who It’s For

The short answer: anybody who writes.

If you’re a coder or a technical writer, you get a lot of useful extras:

• Syntax highlighting for code blocks
• MathJax and KaTeX support
• Mermaid diagrams
• MultiMarkdown, YAML, and Pandoc metadata support
• CriticMarkup

That’s useful, sure, but it’s not really why I care about it.

For the kind of writing I do, the most valuable features are the ones that help me clean up my prose before I hit publish:

• Spelling and grammar checking
• Sentence simplification tips
• Word count, sentence count, and sentence complexity
• Reading time
• Grade-level scoring

That’s the real value. Write where you’re comfortable, then let Marked tell you what the page actually looks like.

The Little Things That Make It Better

Marked has a bunch of features that sound minor until you actually start using them regularly. Flexible search. Automatic table of contents generation. Bookmarking. A visual document overview. Collapsible sections. Keyboard access almost everywhere.

It’s also a very nice Markdown reader, even when you’re not editing. Auto-scroll is there. So is distraction-free mode. And if you want to read faster, there’s even an RSVP-style overlay with adjustable WPM.

If you work with outlines or mind maps, Marked supports embeds from popular apps and can even turn an outline into a mind map directly. That’s a niche feature, but a genuinely useful one if your brain works that way.

There are also browser extensions for sending page URLs or selected content straight into Marked 3, which is a nice touch if you spend any time collecting notes from the web.

Integrations Matter

Marked works the way good Mac software should: it gets out of the way and plays well with the tools you already use.

That means it fits alongside Scrivener, Word, MarsEdit, Bear, Ulysses, Obsidian, and other writing apps. In v3, Scrivener rendering with live preview is new, and Bear and Obsidian callouts are now fully supported.

And for the automation crowd, there’s CLI support and AppleScript. That alone makes it much more interesting than a typical “pretty preview” app.

Final Thoughts

If you have a Setapp subscription, Marked 3 is already there. Otherwise, you can download it directly for a free trial or pick it up from the Mac App Store.

The lifetime price is $69.99, which is a little steep, though not outrageous for a serious utility you’ll keep using. The subscription option is $2.99 per month, which is much easier to justify.

Marked 3 is the kind of Mac app that quietly improves everything around it. It doesn’t try to replace your editor. It makes your writing workflow better by giving you a clearer view of what you’ve actually written, and that’s a pretty compelling trick.

And in classic Brett Terpstra fashion, it’s built by someone who clearly understands the people using it.