Markdown that reads like the document.
A native macOS WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Headings, tables, code,
and best-in-class math and diagrams render as you type — drawn natively over
plain .md files. No web view, no proprietary format, no cloud.
Free & open source (MIT) · macOS 14+ · no account, no cloud, no telemetry.
Notarized & signed —
v1.2.0 release notes.
Quoin v1.2.0
Quoin 1.2.0 is a big one: this is the release where Quoin becomes a first-class macOS citizen — it shows up in Spotlight, Quick Look, the Services menu, Shortcuts, and Handoff — while gaining real table editing, keyboard-first navigation, VoiceOver structure, session restoration, and a private-by-default HTML export. Everything stays exactly what it always was: local files, no telemetry, no runtime network.
System integration — Quoin now lives where you work
- Spotlight finds your documents, headings, front-matter tags, and text snippets; tap a result to open straight to it. The index is private and on-device — nothing uploaded, and it stays in sync as files move or change.
- Quick Look — press Space on a
.mdfile in Finder for a rendered thumbnail and preview, drawn by two embedded extensions that reuse Quoin’s own engine (bounded and fast, with placeholders for heavy diagrams/math). - Shortcuts & Siri (App Intents) — five actions ship ready to use: Create Note, Append Text to Note, Open Note, Search Library, Export Note. Every write goes through the same atomic, byte-lossless path as typing — never a blind file rewrite — and stays inside the library you granted.
- Services menu — select text in any app and choose New Quoin Document with Selection to capture it into a new note.
- Handoff — the document you’re editing is published as your current activity (Handoff banner, Siri Suggestions, window restoration), carrying a boundary-safe
quoin://link rather than a raw path. - Finder, Open With & Open Recent — Quoin declares itself a real Markdown editor while coexisting politely (it never silently steals
.mdfrom your default app), routes Finder-opened files into tabs, and keeps an Open Recent list across launches.
Editing
- Structural table editing — insert/delete rows and columns, move them, set column alignment, and normalize a table without counting pipes. Right-click a table cell or use Format ▸ Table; existing text and alignment always survive, and malformed tables degrade safely instead of corrupting.
- Move to Trash & Duplicate — recoverable delete (system Trash) and collision-free duplicate for library documents, from the sidebar context menu and the File menu.
- Footnotes no longer mis-behave when clicked — footnote definitions are now cleanly read-only rather than resolving to a block the editor couldn’t find.
Keyboard, accessibility & onboarding
- Fully keyboard-operable navigation — arrow-key selection with wrap in Quick Open and library search, and a keyboard cursor for the outline (collapse/expand, disclosure semantics).
- VoiceOver structure — headings are announced with their level, blocks by kind, and math/diagram attachments carry accessibility labels from the engines.
- Discoverable commands — previously hidden shortcuts are now real menu items.
- First-run samples & Help — an optional, opt-in teaching document (never overwrites your files) plus a Help menu routing to bundled guides — all local, no accounts or network.
Export & privacy
- Local images survive export — HTML inlines them as self-contained data URIs; PDF and Print draw them; RTF degrades to an honest visible placeholder; Markdown stays byte-exact.
- Private-by-default HTML export — standalone HTML export sanitizes raw HTML (scripts, event handlers,
javascript:URLs, remote embeds, tracking pixels, and off-device CSS all removed) so a shared file executes nothing and fetches nothing off-device. Opt out for byte-exact raw HTML.
Reliability
- Session & window restoration — quit and relaunch to the same library, tabs, active document, panel layout, and scroll position; moved/deleted files are pruned, forced-termination recovers to the last atomically saved state, and opening an already-open file routes to its existing session.
- iOS/iPadOS — local images now replace their loading placeholders as soon as they decode, matching macOS.
- Drag & drop — the library sidebar now shows clear move/copy/reject feedback and can’t be tricked into moving a folder into its own subtree; image-drop failures surface a non-modal error instead of silently doing nothing.
Windows, single files & polish
- New windows start empty. ⇧⌘N opens a clean window instead of silently reopening your last library; reopening the app still restores your last workspace.
- Single-file editing has no library clutter. Open one
.mdfrom Finder and the window is a full-width editor — no empty library pane. - Your tabs come back after quitting. Open tabs, active document, and layout now survive quit → relaunch even with macOS’s “Close windows when quitting an application” turned on.
- No more phantom “changed on disk” warning. A brand-new document no longer flashes a false conflict banner on the first keystroke.
- Faithful edit reveal. Clicking into a hard-wrapped paragraph no longer balloons its line spacing.
- Tidier export sheet — the format cards and options read cleanly at every size.
Under the hood
- MermaidKit 1.4.0 — the native Mermaid engine moves to its latest release (byte-compatible; existing diagrams render identically).
- Release & privacy audit — a checked-in entitlement/logging/packaging checklist keeps the local-only promise auditable every release.
Install
Download Quoin.dmg below — a notarized, drag-to-install build for macOS 14+.
A calm, native place to write
The document renders as you type — and the file stays plain Markdown. A live word and character count with reading-time and a goal, plus focus mode, typewriter scrolling, and a rounded reading face.
A fast, native home for your Markdown
If your words already live in .md files — or you wish they did — Quoin is a fast, native home for writing, reviewing, and reading them.
Writers & editors
Draft, suggest, and comment with real tracked changes — then accept or reject, right in the file.
Note-takers & thinkers
A quick, native editor for a whole folder of notes: outline, search, front-matter, footnotes, code themes.
Engineers
Plain text under git, no Electron, byte-lossless saves — and an editor an AI agent can safely write into.
Teams
Propose edits as portable marks anyone (or any tool) can read. The review lives in the document, not a silo.
Suggest, comment, accept — all in the Markdown
A real review pass in Quoin: writing tracked-change suggestions and comments, then resolving them from the inspector — the marks live in the Markdown the whole time.
Tracked changes as plain CriticMarkup
Suggestions and comments are CriticMarkup
marks, and their metadata is just a small block of YAML at the end of
the file that ordinary Markdown renderers ignore. Because the file
is the review, it's portable, shows up in git diff,
and anything that can write text — a teammate or an AI agent — can
propose a durable edit.
- Marks render as tracked changes — never raw delimiters
- A review inspector: Accept / Reject / Dismiss, plus Accept All
- Every resolution is one atomic, byte-safe edit = one undo
- Review Mode (
⌃⌘R): typing becomes suggestion marks
Sign-in takes {~~90s~>under 30s~~} today.
Add a {++one-time-code++} fallback. {>>Does this cover SSO?<<}
---
suggestions:
s1: { by: priya, at: "2026-07-14" }Quoin renders those marks as the tracked-changes and comment cards
above — you Accept or Reject, and it rewrites the source in one
byte-safe edit. The YAML block records who suggested what, and when.
Run git diff and you see exactly these bytes: no sidecar
database, no proprietary format, nothing to lock you in.
Native math & diagrams — no browser
Vinculum · LaTeX
A TeX-quality math typesetter (~400 commands: spacing classes, stacked
limits, radicals, auto-sized fences, matrix/cases/aligned),
drawn with CoreText. No MathJax, no KaTeX.
MermaidKit · Diagrams
A native Mermaid engine (Sugiyama layering, orthogonal routing, UML markers, composite states), drawn with CoreGraphics. No Mermaid.js, no headless browser.
MermaidKit site ↗
The source is the document
What's on disk is always plain Markdown — Quoin edits the real file, not a hidden copy. So it opens and saves without silently reformatting your text, an AI agent can safely rewrite a file you have open, and there's nothing proprietary to get locked into.
- Edit one paragraph, save — every untouched line stays byte-for-byte identical
- Click any block to see its real Markdown source, 1:1 with the file
- The line you're editing never jumps on screen
- Fully offline — your files never leave your Mac
Why file-first is different
| Quoin | Google Docs / Word | Obsidian / Typora | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where files live | Plain .md on your disk | Cloud / proprietary .docx | Plain .md on your disk |
| Tracked changes & comments | In the file, as plain text | Yes — proprietary format | No native review |
| Native math & diagrams | Yes — no web view | Limited / add-ons | Via bundled web renderers |
| Works offline, no account | Always | No | Yes |
| An AI agent can edit it | Yes — it's just text | No | Only the raw file |
| Lock-in | None — it's Markdown | High | Low |
Serious LaTeX, honestly scoped
Quoin typesets inline and display LaTeX natively through
Vinculum — ~400 commands, from fractions and
integrals to matrices and aligned environments — and exports to
PDF, HTML, Markdown, RTF, and TXT. Footnotes are click-to-jump with hover previews.
Being straight about the gaps: there's no citation / BibTeX manager and no automatic cross-reference or figure numbering yet. If your work depends on a bibliography or a journal-submission pipeline, Quoin isn't a LaTeX-suite replacement today — it's a fast native editor with real math. See the full command coverage →