A couple of months ago I open-sourced swift-markdown-engine here, the native Markdown engine I built for my macOS app Nodes. The feedback, issues, and PRs that came back were a huge help, A lot of what I changed since then came from that.
WHAT’S NEW: The parser got rewritten from scratch, regex matching is gone, it’s a real AST now. That’s what made the extension system possible: Stuff you wouldn’t expect in standard Markdown, like highlighting, used to be hardcoded into the core grammar. Now it’s opt-in. Write one file, register it, and the core parser/styler/renderer never change. Extensions can’t touch the core or each other, and you can toggle them at runtime.
Also new: full GFM/CommonMark parity, tables, task lists, quotes. More layout control (scroll-away header, fixed reading column, fit-to-content height), and a real writing layer (formatting bus, find & replace with undo, clean RTF/HTML clipboard, raw source mode). Full changelog’s on GitHub if you want details.
When I started Nodes I wanted the editor to feel properly native. Most Markdown editors on the Mac are Electron or some web view wrapped in a window, and you feel it, the text handling never quite behaves like a real Mac app. I wanted live styling in an actual native text view, not HTML rendered to look like one. Nothing built on TextKit 2 that I could just drop into a Mac app existed, so I built it, ran it in Nodes for a while, and then open-sourced it. TextKit 2 is still thin on docs and rough to migrate to, so if you’ve been putting off building something like this, it might save you a few weekends. Issues and PRs welcome. Still pre-1.0, still plenty I want to improve.
A couple of months ago I open-sourced swift-markdown-engine here, the native Markdown engine I built for my macOS app Nodes. The feedback, issues, and PRs that came back were a huge help, A lot of what I changed since then came from that.
WHAT’S NEW: The parser got rewritten from scratch, regex matching is gone, it’s a real AST now. That’s what made the extension system possible: Stuff you wouldn’t expect in standard Markdown, like highlighting, used to be hardcoded into the core grammar. Now it’s opt-in. Write one file, register it, and the core parser/styler/renderer never change. Extensions can’t touch the core or each other, and you can toggle them at runtime.
Also new: full GFM/CommonMark parity, tables, task lists, quotes. More layout control (scroll-away header, fixed reading column, fit-to-content height), and a real writing layer (formatting bus, find & replace with undo, clean RTF/HTML clipboard, raw source mode). Full changelog’s on GitHub if you want details.
When I started Nodes I wanted the editor to feel properly native. Most Markdown editors on the Mac are Electron or some web view wrapped in a window, and you feel it, the text handling never quite behaves like a real Mac app. I wanted live styling in an actual native text view, not HTML rendered to look like one. Nothing built on TextKit 2 that I could just drop into a Mac app existed, so I built it, ran it in Nodes for a while, and then open-sourced it. TextKit 2 is still thin on docs and rough to migrate to, so if you’ve been putting off building something like this, it might save you a few weekends. Issues and PRs welcome. Still pre-1.0, still plenty I want to improve.
written on Nodes
Wow looking forward to try this for a project I'm working on