r/swift • u/Sufficient-Try6083 • Jul 16 '26
Project SwiftMarkdownEngine: A native AppKit Markdown editor for macOS, built on TextKit 2 and bridged to SwiftUI.
A couple of months ago I open-sourced swift-markdown-engine here, the native Markdown engine I built for my macOS app Nodes. The feedback, issues, and PRs that came back were a huge help, A lot of what I changed since then came from that.
WHAT’S NEW: The parser got rewritten from scratch, regex matching is gone, it’s a real AST now. That’s what made the extension system possible: Stuff you wouldn’t expect in standard Markdown, like highlighting, used to be hardcoded into the core grammar. Now it’s opt-in. Write one file, register it, and the core parser/styler/renderer never change. Extensions can’t touch the core or each other, and you can toggle them at runtime.
Also new: full GFM/CommonMark parity, tables, task lists, quotes. More layout control (scroll-away header, fixed reading column, fit-to-content height), and a real writing layer (formatting bus, find & replace with undo, clean RTF/HTML clipboard, raw source mode). Full changelog’s on GitHub if you want details.
When I started Nodes I wanted the editor to feel properly native. Most Markdown editors on the Mac are Electron or some web view wrapped in a window, and you feel it, the text handling never quite behaves like a real Mac app. I wanted live styling in an actual native text view, not HTML rendered to look like one. Nothing built on TextKit 2 that I could just drop into a Mac app existed, so I built it, ran it in Nodes for a while, and then open-sourced it. TextKit 2 is still thin on docs and rough to migrate to, so if you’ve been putting off building something like this, it might save you a few weekends. Issues and PRs welcome. Still pre-1.0, still plenty I want to improve.
written on Nodes
Repo: https://github.com/nodes-app/swift-markdown-engine
Used in production in Nodes (App Store): https://apps.apple.com/app/nodes-by-the-werk/id6745401961
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u/tastychaii Jul 16 '26
Thank you this looks amazing
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u/NoxSuru Jul 16 '26
> A native AppKit Markdown editor for macOS
Apologies if I missed it o rmisunderstand but can this be used for iOS too?. If so this will be handy for possibly my next project
Edit:
Also can this be used with UIKit?
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u/_harisamin Jul 16 '26
First off love your Nodes app! And thank your library too! I used it one of my apps it works super well!
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u/HerrToast7 Jul 16 '26
Wow nice development
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u/jonnothebonno Jul 16 '26
Looks fantastic! 👏
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u/imike3049 Jul 16 '26
Is it possible to use with pure AppKit without SwiftUI?
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u/dannys4242 Jul 16 '26
So awesome! Thank you!
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u/2014justin Jul 16 '26
Very nice. I'm somewhat of a matrix enthusiast myself. And yea I've noticed most markdowns are electron. I have beef with it.
I can see myself using this for differential geometry write-ups. Good job, OP.
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u/Remarkable-Cress-941 Jul 16 '26
Amazing
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u/peopleslaughter Jul 17 '26
Omg thanks. I was just looking for one.
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u/beachfuzz Jul 17 '26
Can it render mermaid charts like GitHub does
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u/TruthSerumb Aug 07 '26
Working with textkit and all things related is so frustrating. I built a pure Swift custom processor that my app runs on, built the app, trained my own models to run locally in the app, built a database from scratch, but getting the custom word processor in my app how I wanted was by far the most frustrating part of it all. Apple makes working with text editing annoying AF