Quickstart

This is the 60-second path from a clean Windows machine to your first rendered .md file. If you want the full installer matrix (winget, Microsoft Store, .exe, .msi — x64 today, ARM64 planned) head to Installation instead.

1. Install

Open a terminal — Windows Terminal, PowerShell, or cmd — and run:

winget install mdview

That installs the app, registers .md as an associated file type, and adds mdview to your PATH. No reboot. About 30 seconds total on a typical connection.

If you don’t have winget, grab the .msi from mdview.dev/download and double-click. Same end result.

2. Open a file

Three ways, pick whichever fits your flow:

• Double-click any .md — Explorer opens it in MD View.
• Right-click → “Open with MD View” — works for any text file even if it’s not associated.
• From the terminal:

  mdview README.md
  mdview .                # open the current folder as a workspace
  cat plan.md | mdview    # pipe stdin
  

3. What you’ll see

A clean, full-width reader with the file’s content rendered. Headings collapse into an outline (toggle with Alt+O), the table of contents lives in the right gutter, and the file path sits in a sticky strip at the top.

The default theme is dark with the body type tuned for long reads. Cycle themes with Alt+T — light, sepia, and black are all there.

That’s it. You’re reading.

Next steps

• Skim the keyboard shortcuts — there are about 25 and they’re all worth learning.
• Pipe and watch from the CLI.
• Two-up reading? Open a second file with Ctrl+Alt+S for split view.
• Exporting? PDF with nested bookmarks lives at Ctrl+Shift+E — see PDF export.

If something’s not behaving, the troubleshooting page covers the common install / runtime fixes.