The questions people actually arrive with, answered in full. The app carries a short version of this offline, because an app that needs no network should not send you to a web page to find out why the space bar does nothing.
The question most people arrive with, and the one nobody can fix from inside an app.
Select the file in Finder, press Command-I, choose NanoFile under Open with, then Change All.
NanoFile cannot do this for you, and neither can any of the alternatives. An app installed from the App Store is not allowed to change which app owns a file type: the API exists and compiles, and the sandbox refuses it at runtime. So this is one minute of your time, once, and then it is done.
Why no App Store app can do this for you →Check that the Quick Look extension is switched on. Open System Settings, then General, then Login Items and Extensions, find Quick Look, and turn NanoFile on.
macOS sometimes leaves a newly installed extension switched off without saying so. Often it works straight away, which is why this is worth checking rather than assuming.
On this website, sixteen: markdown in all its extensions, plain text, the common data formats, and files with no extension at all such as README, LICENCE and CHANGELOG. The viewer says plainly when a file is not one it reads, rather than showing you something broken.
The app opens far more than that. Ninety-one extensions, fifteen dot-files and twenty-one bare names, including fifty-six code extensions across thirty-five highlighted languages. Everything this site opens, the app opens; the reverse is not true, so a .gradle or a .zshrc is an app question rather than a website one.
Data files are shown as coloured code, with one exception worth knowing: in the app a CSV or a TSV becomes a real table rather than a wall of commas.
Three things the app does that a browser tab has no way to do: show you the source, walk a whole folder, and follow a link from one note to another.
Switch the view. Document is the page as it reads. Source is the file exactly as it sits on disk, with nothing hidden and nothing tidied. Split is both at once, keeping pace as you type. Command-1, 2 and 3 on a Mac.
On a phone the split stacks, one half above the other. On an iPad or a Mac the two sit side by side.
The picker is there for every file type rather than for markdown alone, because reading the source of a converted PDF is often the reason you opened it. What is not on offer is writing that source back.
Yes, names and contents together. Where did I write that, and what was that file called, are the same question asked from two ends, so one box answers both.
It walks the folder each time instead of building an index. That is the slower way on paper and it is the entire point: no copy of your documents is kept anywhere, not even a private one that never leaves the machine. Files over 4 MB are skipped, so are hidden files and package contents, and it stops at 300 hits, because past that the answer is a narrower query rather than a longer list.
Replacing across a folder is the same box doing something else entirely. Search reads and reports; replace writes to files you have not opened. That is why it shows you what it is about to do before it does it, and keeps one undo for the whole run.
They do. [[Another note]] looks beside the current document first and then anywhere in the open folder, which is the order somebody writing the link had in mind.
A target with no extension gets .md, .markdown and .txt tried in that order, and the sweep through the folder ignores capitals. When nothing matches, the app says there is no note by that name rather than doing nothing at all, which is the difference between a link you can fix and a link you never notice.
On this website they stay as the text you typed. A wiki-link needs a folder to point into and a single uploaded document has none.
Nowhere, and the reason is worth more than the promise.
No, and there is nowhere for it to go: the page that renders your document is not allowed to make a network request at all. That is a capability, not an intention, which is why it is worth stating.
On the website you can check it yourself. Open your browser's network tab, load a document, and read the requests. None of them carries your file, because this site has no upload endpoint to carry it to.
The one exception is the repository checker, which asks GitHub about a public repository you named. That page says so above its input box.
The full privacy policy →Only when you save, and then it writes back to the same file, in the same folder, where your other tools can see it. Nothing is imported and no copy is kept.
On the website there is nowhere to save back to, so the editor is for reading, changing and taking away: use Download .md to keep your version.
No. It would mean storing a token, and the promise that nothing leaves this device is worth more than the feature.
Public repositories work everywhere, with no account and no sign-in.
The repository checker →Usually the file is fine and the renderer is telling you something.
That is deliberate, and the app says so above the document: “This is a reading of the page. Styling and scripts are not applied.”
If the page is nearly empty you will see a different line: “This page builds its content with scripts, so there is little to read here. The source view shows the file.” Which is the honest answer for a modern web application, whose HTML file contains almost nothing until a browser runs it.
A PDF has no structure. It has glyphs at coordinates in a font size, and every heading, list and paragraph is inferred from that. It gets most documents right and it will not get a complicated layout right, because the information simply is not in the file.
A Word file is better, because .docx does record what is a heading and what is a list. What it loses is anything markdown has no word for: text boxes, columns, comments and tracked changes.
How the PDF converter works →Run it through the checker, on this website or in the app. It reports the mistakes that render wrong silently rather than loudly: a checkbox with no space between the brackets, a table missing its divider row, a fence that never closes and swallows the rest of the file, a link with a space in the wrong place. Checking a whole folder at once does the same thing across a directory, and looks at the markdown files only: markdown rules applied to a .swift would cry wolf on every line.
If the document is clean and it still looks wrong somewhere else, it is probably not a mistake but a difference between renderers. The compatibility table has every construct against seven platforms.
Which markdown works where →The document is yours, and it should leave in whatever shape you need.
On a Mac, in the app or on the website: Print, then Save as PDF from the dropdown. On an iPhone or iPad there is no such button on the print sheet, which catches people out: tap the share icon in the corner of the sheet instead and choose Save to Files.
The website prints with a stylesheet that puts the document on the page and nothing else, so you get the document rather than a screenshot of a website.
The page breaks fall where the browser puts them. Markdown has no page concept, so nothing in the file says where a page should end.
Markdown to PDF →On this website: out to Word as a real .docx with proper heading styles, and to HTML, PDF, RTF and plain text. In from PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML and RTF.
The app converts less, on purpose, and differently in one place. Out: markdown, HTML, Word and PDF through the print panel. Its Word export is a .doc rather than a .docx, which is HTML that Word opens, and the honest extension for it. In: PDF, Word and Excel. A CSV, a JSON or an HTML file is not converted in the app at all: it is opened and shown as what it is.
Either way it runs on your own machine.
All the tools and converters →The checker, rule for rule: the app runs this site's checker on your own files rather than a copy of them. The converters overlap rather than match, as above. The generators are here only.
What the app has in their place is a formatting bar, applied to whatever you have selected: bold, italics, strikethrough, inline code, heading, list, checkbox, link and table. The table button drops in an empty two by two skeleton with the caret in the first header cell. That is a keyboard shortcut with a button on it rather than the generator here, which takes pasted data, works out the columns and sets the alignment.
Counting sits between the two. The app shows words, characters, lines and a reading estimate under the document you have open, as a readout rather than as something you paste into.
The table generator, which is a website thing →Nothing, and nothing. There is no purchase in the app, no subscription, no paid tier and no account, so there is nothing to unlock, nothing to restore and no price to look up. The app does not contact the App Store while it runs.
That includes the folder tools, which were the paid half until 28 August 2026: converting a folder of files in one go, finding and replacing across all of them, checking every file at once, renaming a file so that every link to it follows, and keeping several folders open as workspaces. They are in the app.
This is the present tense and it is deliberately not a promise about the future. What is true today is that everything in the app is in the app, and this page says what is true today.
The answers about the apps were checked against their own source on 28 August 2026. Every number on this page about the apps, as JSON.
NanoFile is an app for iPhone, iPad and Mac as well: the same renderer, reading files straight off your device, free and with nothing to buy inside it. On the Mac it takes over .md files properly, so a double-click opens the document and the space bar previews it in Finder.
For iPhone, iPad and Mac.
The markdown reference answers what a piece of syntax does and where it works. The tools each explain themselves on their own page. If what you need is none of those, write to privacy@digitalsandbox.app, which reaches a person.