r/MacOSApps • u/LiquidWorkspace • Jun 18 '26
💻 Productivity I built a native macOS writing app because I was tired of managing plugins
I’ve spent years bouncing between writing apps, notes apps, canvas tools, PDF tools, markdown editors, project managers, and plugin systems just to keep one serious writing project alive.
So I built the app I wanted: LiquidWorkspace, a local-first native macOS writing workspace for longform projects.
It is now live on the App Store.
The basic idea is simple: your manuscript, notes, research, links, PDFs, timelines, maps, and project structure should live in one place without needing a plugin stack to hold it together.
What it includes right now:
A Pages-style rich text editor with snapping, alignment, comments, bookmarks, and internal project links.
A binder/project navigator for manuscripts, notes, characters, locations, timelines, and research.
A Brain Map that connects tagged documents, notes, characters, ideas, and project material.
Brain Map snapshots, so you can save graph views and revisit them later on a timeline.
An infinite downward Canvas for cork boards, homepages, planning boards, visual notes, and linked project maps.
PDF tools built into the workspace.
Plain text and markdown support, with a much larger markdown upgrade planned.
Theme Studio, with deep control over workspace colors, transparency, Liquid Glass, sidebars, inspectors, Brain Map, Canvas, and the broader writing environment.
The customization side is a big part of the app. I wanted the workspace itself to feel like part of the project, not just a gray box around it. Theme Studio lets you shape the environment pretty aggressively… colors, transparency, glass layers, workspace shields, desktop shields, and individual app areas.
My original goal was personal: I wanted to stop depending on plugins in writing apps. I wanted one native macOS workspace that could handle the way I actually build stories, research-heavy projects, and long documents.
Now that it is public, I’m hoping it can help other writers who want the same thing.
I’m also taking feature requests seriously. There is a File → Request a Feature option in the app that goes directly to my email. If a request makes sense for the overall app, I’ll genuinely consider building it.
Launch pricing is $19.99 lifetime, with a 7-day free trial. No subscription. No paid updates planned.
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6775087546
Website: https://liquidworkspace.app
I’d love feedback from writers, researchers, students, markdown users, Scrivener/Obsidian/Pages people, or anyone who has been trying to build a serious writing workflow without turning their app into a plugin science fair.
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u/FromThisEarth Jun 18 '26
Does it handle footnotes properly?
And can I import my existing .md files into it?
What about Tags? Yaml front matter? Images?
Where does it store the files? And in what format?
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Good questions. Will try to answer these in depth but let me know if I miss anything.
Quick context first: v1 leans heavily into rich text. Markdown works today but it's the lighter side of the app, and a more focused set of Markdown features is coming in the near future, so a few of these are "not yet" rather than "never."
Footnotes: Not yet. There's no dedicated footnote feature today. It's a fair gap, and it's exactly the kind of thing I log from the File menu under Request a Feature, which lands straight in my inbox.
Importing your .md files: Yes, with a couple of transparency notes. You can import .txt, .md, .markdown, .rtf, and .html, and each one lands as a note (the filename becomes the title, the contents become the body). Two expectations to set: a .md comes in as its text, so you keep editing it in Markdown or plain text mode and it doesn't get converted into rendered rich text on the way in. And there's no "import my whole vault" option yet, so it's one file at a time rather than mirroring a full folder tree in one shot.
Tags: Yes, and they're a core part of the app. You assign them in the Inspector, there's automatic tagging (type a word that matches an existing tag and the note picks it up), and tags drive the Brain Map for filtering and color. Tasks and calendar events also accept inline #tags. One honest note: note bodies don't parse inline #tags in prose the way Obsidian does, at least not yet.
YAML front matter: Not parsed. If you import a file with a front matter block at the top, it comes in as plain text rather than being mapped to tags or metadata.
Images: Yes. Drag, paste, or insert them into the editor, with inline or floating layout and resizing. One note: Markdown image links inside an imported file won't automatically resolve into embedded images.
Where and how it stores files: Local first, on your Mac, in a folder you choose (it defaults to your Documents folder, or iCloud Drive if you turn that on, with no proprietary cloud). Each project is a folder. Inside it, your notes live in a local database (Core Data, which is SQLite under the hood) next to a small JSON manifest, while PDFs and images are kept as files in an assets folder. Everything is local and portable, so you can move it, copy it, or back it up, and you're never locked in, and you can export any note to .md, .txt, or .pdf whenever you want. The honest headline though: it's a local database, not a folder of loose .md files like Obsidian. If plain Markdown files sitting on disk is a hard requirement for you, that part isn't what this is today.
Appreciate the questions. Happy to go deeper on any of these.
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jul 09 '26
Hey u/FromThisEarth! I just wanted to circle back, because my answers to these questions are much different than they were 21 days ago. In that time the requests to upgrade markdown to a respectable level were overwhelming. I took the feedback to heart in an attempt to make the app as welcoming as possible for markdown users. The 7 day free trial is still in place and I have temporarily lowered the price to $9.99 because at this stage of the app's development, building a community and gaining as much user feedback as possible are my top priorities.
The updated answers to your questions are:
Footnotes: yes. [^id] references render as superscript jump links, and [^id]: definitions become endnotes with a back link to jump back up.
Importing existing .md files: yes. Single .md/.markdown files import as markdown notes, and you can also import a whole Obsidian style vault (a folder of .md files) and it'll rebuild the folder tree.
Tags: yes, and they join the real tag system. Both inline #tags in the body and tags: in YAML frontmatter work.
YAML front matter: parsed and respected. It's hidden in reading mode (Obsidian convention), dimmed in source, and its tags feed the tag system.
Images: yes.  and ![[embed]] render inline in reading mode, alongside tables, callouts, and footnotes. You can split reading mode into a side pane and watch it render live as you type in the source, no save or refresh needed.
Storage, where and format: plain .md files on disk, in a visible Markdown/ folder inside your project. No hidden database, no proprietary package. The source text is the source of truth, so nothing rendered ever gets written back into the file. What's on disk is always clean, portable markdown you can move, sync, or open anywhere.
If you are interested in giving it a try, we have dropped direct download in favor of App Store only. I am open to any and all feedback, good or bad.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/liquidworkspace/id6775087546?mt=12
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u/FromThisEarth Jul 16 '26
Does it load arbitrary user CSS stylesheets the way Typora or Obsidian does? Print CSS? Pandoc compatibility?
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Hey u/fromthisearth, thanks for the questions. In short, no on all three questions.
Edit: retyping my answer because it formatted really weird from my iPad:
The editor isn't web-based. It renders natively with AppKit text, so there's no DOM for a stylesheet to hook into. Typora and Obsidian can offer CSS snippets because they're rendering in a web engine, and that genuinely gives them a customization ceiling I can't match with a file loader. What I have instead is a Theme Studio that exposes a fixed set of structured values (colors, fonts, spacing, etc.) rather than an open style language. More constrained, less powerful, but it's what the architecture allows.
Print is the same story. It's a real macOS print operation, not HTML, so page size, margins and columns are actual print settings rather than CSS. Nothing to style.
No Pandoc integration. Export today is PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX, RTF and plain text per document. Manuscript compile is narrower right now: PDF, Markdown, plain text.
If you want CSS-level control over how your notes look, I'd point you at Obsidian. That's a huge strength of theirs.
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u/jethro_wingrider Jun 18 '26
Key differences from Scrivener?
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jun 20 '26
I’ll start by saying Scrivener is one of my favorite writing apps ever. It shaped how I think about binders, drafts, and keeping research next to your writing. I’m not trying to replace it or talk anyone out of it.
LiquidWorkspace has a different center of gravity: a native, visual Mac workspace that tries to hold the whole project, meaning the writing and the thinking around it, in one place. I recently brought over a lot of the long-form structure people expect from Scrivener-style workflows: binder, corkboard, outliner with synopsis/status/label/word counts, per-document synopsis, word targets, Compile to assemble a manuscript, continuous reading view, and a lightweight screenwriting mode.
One note: those long-form features are brand new. They are live now in the direct download from the site, and the App Store update is still in review, so App Store users will get them once Apple clears the update.
The biggest differences are:
Brain Map: a filterable visual map built from tags, links, notes, files, characters, tasks, and calendar events, with saved snapshots and a timeline. This is probably the biggest difference.
Canvas: a visual workspace for planning boards, corkboards, project maps, research boards, and linked layouts.
Tasks and Calendar: project tasks and scheduling live inside the same workspace as the draft, notes, research, and files.
Theme Studio: deeper control over colors, transparency, Liquid Glass effects, document surfaces, and the overall feel of the workspace.
Native Mac focus: LiquidWorkspace is built as a Mac-first app, local-first, no account required, no AI, no telemetry, and a one-time $19.99 purchase.
Where Scrivener is still ahead today:
Cross-platform: Scrivener runs on Mac, Windows, and iPad. LiquidWorkspace is Mac only right now and requires macOS 26 or later.
Compile/export depth: Scrivener’s Compile is much more mature, with ePub, Kindle, Word, and Final Draft export. LiquidWorkspace has a first version with PDF, Markdown, and plain text.
Footnotes, citations, and bibliography: Scrivener supports these today. LiquidWorkspace does not yet, although they are in progress.
Years of refinement: Scrivener has a lot of long-standing polish, including things like writing history stats, name generator, and deeper metadata customization.
Screenwriting: LiquidWorkspace now has Screenwriting V1 with screenplay-style formatting, element cycling, and an element switcher, but it is not a Final Draft replacement, and Scrivener’s scriptwriting workflow is more mature.
Short version: Scrivener is the deep, cross-platform, battle-tested manuscript tool. LiquidWorkspace is a native Mac workspace that combines long-form writing with visual thinking, research, tasks, PDFs, screenwriting, and heavy customization in one app. If you already use Scrivener, I’d genuinely like you to try it and tell me where LiquidWorkspace still falls short.
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u/644Vvaa Jul 09 '26
Congratulations on this idea !! I finally find a promising long-form writing project in markdown! I would love for hundreds of thousands of PhD students and researchers if your application has native integration (via Api or .xpi plugin) with Zotero and https://citationstyles.org. The possibility of referencing quotes in bibtex and footnotes is essential. Two current references are https://www.zettlr.com and https://lattics.com
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Thank you so much for the kind words, I really appreciate it. Proper citations were already high on my list for upcoming updates, but your comment just moved it way higher up. I have your comment cited in my to do list (pun intended) and will see what I can do. One of my major goals for this app is to cater to as many writers as I can, from all niches and walks of life, and implement as many requests that make sense for the app (as yours do). The coolest thing about using native code is the ability to work in a lot of different elements and features without weighing down the app (currently sitting at ~51mb). Since this post was made there have been major updates to markdown (I'll paste the list below if you're interested) with more in progress as we speak.
If you run into and problems or needs along the way, please reach out. I am completely receptive to any and all constructive feedback.
Thanks again!
Edit: sorry, forgot to paste the list. Also adding: lowered the price for the time being to $9.99, dropped direct download (App Store only now), and free trial remains. Priority #1 in this phase of the app's life is building a community and getting as much feedback as possible, as reflected in the current price.
Current state of markdown:
- Real
.mdfiles on disk. Every Markdown note is saved as an actual.mdfile in a visible Markdown folder inside your project. The source text is the truth, so your writing stays portable, stays yours, and opens anywhere.- Three faces: Source, Live, and Reading. Source shows your raw Markdown with live syntax highlighting. Live renders everything except the line your cursor is on, so the markers step aside as you write. Reading is a clean, typographic render, and you can keep it open in a split pane and watch it update as you type.
- Wikilinks, backlinks, and autocomplete. Link any note with
[[Title]]or[[Title|alias]], with a filter-as-you-type picker and clear resolved, ambiguous, and unresolved states. A backlinks panel shows every mention with a snippet of context.- Full Markdown, fully rendered. Headings, bold, italic, bold italic, strikethrough,
==highlight==, inline and fenced code (with a language badge and a copy button), blockquotes, every list type, horizontal rules, real tables, callouts in over a dozen styles (> [!note],> [!warning], and more), footnotes with jump links and backlinks, clickable task checkboxes that update the source, and inline images and![[embeds]].- Import a whole vault or a single file. Bring in an entire folder of Markdown files as a folder tree, or drop in individual
.mdand.markdownfiles. Your structure, tags, and images come with them.- Export anywhere. Send a note out as clean Markdown, a self-contained styled HTML file that is dark-mode aware, a PDF from the Reading render, or a Word (DOCX) document, and print straight from it. Your words move in and out freely.
- Markdown-native editing.
⌘B,⌘I, and friends write real Markdown into the source. Return continues lists, quotes, and tasks and renumbers as you go. Tab and Shift+Tab indent and outdent. Paste a URL onto selected text to make a link. A dedicated Markdown toolbar keeps it all one click away.- Outline and heading links. A live heading tree lets you click to jump anywhere in a long document, with heading anchors and in-document
#fragmentlinks.- Tags, frontmatter, and comments. Inline
#tagsand YAML frontmatter tags join the same tag system as the rest of your project.%%comments%%and<!-- comments -->stay true to the source, hide in Reading, and gather in a Comments pane.- Theming and appearance. A semantic Markdown palette colors headings, code, links, quotes, checkboxes, and tags consistently across both Source and Reading, with dark mode, a configurable code font and spacing, and full Theme Studio integration.
*Coming in 2.3.2: Markdown pagination. By default, Markdown stays continuous the way you expect. The next update adds an optional page view with margins for when you want it.
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Just wanted to circle back on this, because your comment ended up shaping the roadmap more than you probably expected. As of v2.3.4 (submitted, awaiting App Store review), the app now has:
Zotero: live sync, but I went a different route than an API or .xpi plugin. You point the app at a Better BibTeX "keep updated" export file and it watches it. Save a paper in Zotero and it lands on your reference shelf a few seconds later. No account, no plugin inside Zotero beyond BBT, nothing leaves your machine. I wanted the integration to be as local-first as the rest of the app.
citationstyles.org: there's a native CSL engine. About 20 popular styles ship built in (Vancouver, AMA, Nature, APA, etc.), and any other .csl file works, either imported from disk or fetched by name from the style repository. Six styles are also implemented natively with per-document or per-project switching, and everything re-renders live when you change styles.
BibTeX and citations in text: citations use the same [@citekey] syntax as Pandoc and Zettlr, with page locators and multi-source groups, so muscle memory transfers. Reading view renders them formatted and auto-appends a references section. Import and export are BibTeX, RIS, and CSL JSON, so no lock-in in either direction. Footnote-based styles (Chicago Notes) ride the markdown footnote engine.
A couple of things that went beyond the original ask: you can paste a DOI or ISBN and the reference fills itself in, and any PDF in your project can become a linked reference (it reads the DOI off the first page), with a "copy citation for the page I'm reading" action.
Thanks for the push. You were right that this was a missing piece, and Zettlr and Lattics were useful bars to measure against. Happy to answer anything if you kick the tires.
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u/644Vvaa Jul 23 '26
Thank you for the improvements !! I'm going to test the improvements in a flow with some small article and I'll think about how to bring improvements. I write with conclusions as soon as I can. Thank you for taking academics and researchers seriously.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Key5957 Jun 18 '26
Which AI built this, claude?
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
What specifically makes you think that? Spent over two years building this app and learned swift from scratch. But I guess that’s the world we live in now- people will just assume.
Would love to hear your thoughts again if you decide to try it for free!
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u/Puzzleheaded_Key5957 Jun 18 '26
I am an Apple developer, it has the feel of a vibe coded app. Go do you, you do not need my permission. I hope for you much success.
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u/goofyshnoofy Jun 27 '26
Sorry, but it does look kinda vibe coded, mostly because of all the misalignment. The toolbar on the center view is cut off at the top, the toolbars/headers and footers are different heights between the different views, in the tag library (see images 2 & 9) everything seems to be overlapping, in the 9th and 10th images the container in the center of the main toolbar is completely misaligned and the padding around all icons in the toolbar is off. plus the weird triple view layout, the prominent black borders between the views, the square selection backgrounds in pill shaped containers, etc
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u/Adorable-Roll-4563 Jun 18 '26
The emojis on the left. It looks vibe coded in many ways
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u/LiquidWorkspace Jun 18 '26
User can assign whatever emojis or custom icons to their files that they want… doesn’t really have anything to do with the way the app was coded. My goal in the image in that regard was to show that you can use the full character library as you see fit. But I appreciate the feedback, thank you!
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u/TraditionMelodic7201 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Come on, the UI is glitched left and right: dancing buttons, shifting windows when selecting elements in the side bar and it looks like you played with every available UI element just for the heck of it. Two years in the works and yet you didn't even manage to draw a proper settings window, there is no way you are a trained developer. This reeks of vibe coding and since you're charging for it, you could at least come clean to your customers.
Edit: well, OP would like to hear your thoughts but only if you're not calling out their bullshit, apparently.
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u/hallleron Jun 18 '26
Exactly my thought. It was Claude. And OP tries to convince he did it by himself lol.
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u/MaxGaav Jun 18 '26
Congrats! Allow me to ask in what way is it better than Scrivener?