Live reload — markdown updates as you save

When the file on disk changes, MD View shows the new version. No refresh button. No “press F5 to reload.” No flashing white between states. The view updates in place and your scroll position stays where it was.

This is the feature that makes MD View the right tool for the AI coding era. When Claude Code rewrites CLAUDE.md, you see the new version immediately. When Cursor regenerates AGENTS.md, the view reflects it the moment the editor saves. When make docs runs and spits out a fresh RELEASE.md, you don’t have to remember to refresh.

How it works

MD View watches the file’s containing directory through a debounced file-system watcher (notify-debouncer-full). When a change comes in:

The watcher fires.
The frontend re-reads the file via the Tauri IPC.
The render pipeline rebuilds the document.
The new HTML mounts into #content while preserving scroll position relative to the nearest visible heading.

The entire round trip feels instantaneous in normal use — by the time you alt-tab back, the new content is already there.

What you’ll notice

Scroll position stays. If you were halfway through a long RFC, you stay halfway through. The renderer anchors to the closest visible heading and reapplies your scroll on the new content.
Embedded images refresh. If an ![](./diagram.png) updates, the new bitmap is fetched and shown. Cache busting is handled.
Mermaid + math re-render. Diagrams and KaTeX equations re-evaluate from scratch on every reload — they stay in sync with the source.
External edits work too. It doesn’t matter what wrote the file — your editor, an agent, a script, git checkout. As long as Windows fires a file-change event, MD View notices.

Use cases

Reading agent-generated markdown

You ask Claude Code to “rewrite the project plan as bulletted sub-tasks under each phase.” It does. The new plan.md lands on disk. MD View shows it. You scroll, you read, you decide. No context switch into the editor’s preview pane.

Reviewing a build artifact

Your CI emits a RELEASE.md after each tag. Run mdview RELEASE.md once and leave the window open in a corner of your monitor — every new build pushes the latest notes into view.

Watching a doc generator

mdbook build, pandoc, custom doc scripts — anything that writes markdown to disk. Open the file in MD View and treat the window as a live preview pane.

Git-aware reading

Run git checkout some-other-branch and the file flips to that branch’s version. Scroll to the part you care about, hop back to your branch, see the original content — no reopen, no refresh.

Comparison

App	Reload behavior
MD View	Instant, in place, scroll preserved
VS Code preview	Manual `Ctrl`+`Shift`+`V` reopen, scroll lost
Typora	Re-import dialog if file changed externally
Markdown Monster	Manual reload
Browser preview (markdown.html)	Manual `F5`

Caveats

Network drives: mapped drives over SMB sometimes fire change events with delays of multiple seconds — that’s a Windows / network filesystem limitation, not the watcher.
Massive files: documents over ~5 MB take longer to re-render because the markdown-it parser is the bottleneck, not the watcher. Sub-second reloads are typical up to ~2 MB.
Stdin documents don’t reload — they have no on-disk path. Pipe the content again to refresh.