Feather MD

A native, dual-pane Markdown editor that opens instantly and stays out of your way.

< 100ms
Cold Start
5 MB
Installer
50 MB
Resident RAM
100%
Local & Private

Live Web Demo

14px
feathermd — getting-started.md
C:\Users\feathermd\documents\getting-started.md
0 words | Ln 1, Col 1 | UTF-8 | LF

Engineered to write. Built to fly.

01

Bidirectional Scroll Sync

Scroll either the CodeMirror 6 editor or the preview pane, and the other pane follows perfectly with ratio-based tracking.

02

Advanced Printing Engine

Bypasses browser native limits to print beautiful, clean, multi-page documents without hostnames or page URLs.

03

Signed Auto-Updates

Release packages are cryptographically signed with Ed25519 for absolute security, updating seamlessly on launch.

04

OS File Association

Integrates directly with Windows and Linux. Double-click any markdown file to launch instantly from your file manager.

05

Premium Unified Header

Combines window titlebar and editor toolbar into a singular, mathematically centered bar with floating interactive tooltips.

06

10 Built-In UI Themes

Five light and five dark themes. Switch instantly under 1ms with custom repainting locked to CSS root variables.

07

External File Watcher

Monitors active files in the background using tokio async channels. Prompting you instantly on external alterations.

08

Keyboard-First Workflows

Full command panel shortcuts for fast toggles of line numbering, word wraps, active-line highlights, and find/replace.

How It Compares

Metric / Feature Feather MD VS Code Typora Obsidian Notion
Installer Size ~5 MB ~90 MB ~85 MB ~110 MB ~150 MB
Resident Memory (RAM) ~50 MB ~300 MB ~150 MB ~400 MB ~250 MB
Cold Startup Time < 100 ms 1 to 3 s < 1 s 1 to 2 s 2 to 4 s
Dual-pane preview Built-in Extension / split Hybrid only Plugin No
Native Binary Yes (Tauri) No (Electron) No (Electron) No (Electron) No (Electron)
Telemetry None Opt-out Opt-out Opt-in Full Tracking
Licensing & Cost Free, MIT Free, MIT Paid Free, freemium Proprietary

The Technology Stack

01
Shell & Core

Tauri 2 (Rust)

Natively compiled Rust core utilizing host webviews to ship a secure, 5 MB package with zero Electron runtime bloat.

02
Editing Area

CodeMirror 6

Modular, tree-shaken editor core supporting active-line highlighting, quote auto-pairing, folding, and custom Vim keys.

03
Compilation Pipeline

Marked + DOMPurify

Synchronous Markdown compiler coupled with DOMPurify XSS protection and Highlight.js on-demand syntax loading.

Get Feather MD

01

Windows

x64 setup

v1.9.0
Download .exe (5.0 MB)
02

Linux Debian

x64 .deb

v1.9.0
Download .deb (7.8 MB)
03

Linux AppImage

Universal Portable

v1.9.0
Download .AppImage (81.4 MB)