// the find
tw93/MiaoYan
⛷ Lightweight Markdown app to help you write great sentences.
MiaoYan is a native Swift Markdown editor for macOS with a split editor/preview layout, wikilink backlinks, and a companion CLI. It's aimed at developers who want a fast, local-first notes app and don't need WYSIWYG editing or built-in sync.
Genuinely native Swift/AppKit app rather than another Electron wrapper, so it's lighter on memory and starts instantly. The split-view mode does real-time 60fps bidirectional scroll sync between editor and preview, and the maintainers explicitly rejected WYSIWYG rather than half-implementing it, which is an honest tradeoff instead of a half-baked feature. It ships a real test suite (wikilink indexing, frontmatter parsing, HTML-to-Markdown conversion, clipboard UTF-16 edge cases) that goes well beyond what most editor projects on GitHub bother with. The CLI (`miao open/new/search/list/cat`) is a nice touch for people who want to touch notes from a terminal without opening the GUI.
The open-source GitHub/Homebrew build is now fix-only — new features go exclusively to the paid Mac App Store edition, so star count and perceived activity don't map cleanly to what you actually get for free. There's no built-in sync; it just reads/writes a folder, so cross-device consistency depends entirely on iCloud Drive, Nutstore, or Dropbox handling conflicts correctly, and nothing in the app resolves a conflicting simultaneous edit. It's macOS-only (12.0+), so there's no path for Windows/Linux users or anyone wanting the mobile app without paying. If you specifically want Typora-style live rendering instead of a split pane, this isn't going to grow into that — the maintainers have said so directly.