prathamreet/feathermd

Feather MD is a native desktop Markdown editor built to open instantly and use as little memory as possible. It is built with Tauri instead of Electron, which means it relies on the operating system's own web view rather than shipping a full separate browser inside the app, keeping the installer around 5 megabytes and idle memory use around 30 megabytes. The editor's main layout is a dual pane view, with a text editor on the left side and a live preview of the rendered Markdown on the right. Scrolling either pane keeps the other one in sync, and this behavior can be toggled off with a keyboard shortcut. The text editor itself is built on CodeMirror 6 and includes Markdown syntax styling, code folding, automatic pairing of brackets and quotes, active line highlighting, and find and replace. Code blocks inside documents are highlighted using Highlight.js, which loads language support for a given fenced code block only when needed rather than upfront. The app ships with ten built in themes, five light and five dark, and switching between them is effectively instant. Other features include a printing engine built to support long multi page documents cleanly, a watcher that reloads a file if it changes outside the app while asking first if there are unsaved edits, a recent files list, a command line launcher, and native operating system file associations so double clicking a Markdown file opens it directly in Feather MD. Updates are signed and delivered through a built in auto updater, and the app avoids telemetry, background services, and accounts entirely. The README includes a performance table with concrete measured numbers, including a sub 100 millisecond cold start, roughly 50 megabytes of memory while editing a 10,000 word document, and a full automated test suite. It also compares Feather MD against VS Code, Typora, and Obsidian on installer size, memory use, and startup time, positioning itself as notably smaller and faster on all three. Prebuilt releases are available for Windows and Linux, and building from source needs Node.js 18 or newer, a stable Rust toolchain, and the relevant WebView development packages on Linux. The project is licensed under MIT.