Why Markdown Readers Shouldn't Need an Install — How I Built EdgeMD Viewer

I read a lot of Markdown files — project docs, meeting notes, personal journals. But every time I wanted to quickly preview a .md file, I hit the same wall: Typora wants a license. VS Code needs a workspace. GitHub Gist needs internet. For something as simple as "read this file beautifully," the friction was absurd. So I asked: what if a Markdown reader was just a single HTML file? No install. No server. No dependencies. Drag a file in, read it, done. That's EdgeMD Viewer. The Problem With Existing Tools Markdown tooling in 2026 falls into two camps. On one side, you have full-featured editors — Typora, Obsidian, VS Code — packed with plugins, configs, and sidebars. They're great for writing, but wildly overkill when you just want to read a file. On the other side, you have raw GitHub rendering or bare-bones browser previews. Functional, but ugly. No typography. No spacing. No joy. I wanted the reading experience of a well-designed app with the setup cost of opening a browser tab. How