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OpenMark 1.4.1: Share Extension, Wiki Links, and a Redesigned Sidebar

OpenMark 1.4.1 adds an inbound Share Extension, wiki-style [[links]], smart list renumbering, table formatting, and a redesigned native sidebar. Plus math rendering fixes, a security update to bundled libraries, and roughly 10x faster typing in large documents.

Short answer: OpenMark 1.4.1 adds an inbound Share Extension, wiki-style [[links]], smart list renumbering, table formatting, and a redesigned native sidebar. It also fixes several math rendering bugs and speeds up typing roughly 10x in large documents.


This one covers a lot of ground. OpenMark 1.4 was built but never shipped — it got stuck behind an Xcode requirement we couldn't clear in time — so 1.4.1 picks up everything from both releases. If you've been on 1.3, this is a big jump.


Sharing, in Both Directions

OpenMark now shows up in the Share menu of other apps. Select a paragraph in Safari, some text in Notes, or a snippet from Mail, share it to OpenMark, and it becomes a new markdown document — links and formatting carried over, not just plain text.

Sharing out has been rebuilt on the system share sheet too. One click gets you the real macOS sheet — AirDrop, Mail, Messages, Copy — instead of a custom picker getting in the way. PDF and HTML export moved to the File menu, where they arguably should have been from the start.


Wiki-Style [[Links]]

You can now link between documents in the same folder with [[double brackets]]. Link to a file that doesn't exist yet and OpenMark shows it differently, so broken links are easy to spot at a glance instead of discovering them by clicking.

This is one of the more requested "Obsidian-style" conveniences, brought into OpenMark's plain-file model — no vault, no import step, just links between the markdown files already on your disk.


Smart List Renumbering

Insert an item in the middle of a numbered list and everything below it renumbers automatically — nested lists included. It's a single undo if you want it back the way it was.

Small thing, but if you've ever manually renumbered a 20-item list after inserting one step in the middle, you know why this shipped.


Table Formatting

Press ⌘⇧T and OpenMark aligns your table columns for you, preserving alignment markers. Tab moves between cells while you're filling one in. Writing and editing markdown tables by hand is a lot less tedious now.


A Redesigned Sidebar

The outline sidebar has been rebuilt on the standard macOS sidebar component. It picks up the system's translucent Liquid Glass material, it's resizable, and content flows behind it the way it does in Notes or Maps. Rows use standard indentation to show hierarchy instead of the old color-coded heading levels.


Math Rendering, Properly

Formulas with subscripts and matrices were rendering incorrectly — the markdown parser was consuming underscores before the math engine ever got to see them. That's fixed; formulas now round-trip exactly as written.

Separately, math had been falling back to system fonts instead of KaTeX's own fonts for longer than we'd like to admit. Also fixed.


Everything Else That's New

Reading time now shows in the status bar.

Adjustable font size in Document view — no longer locked to one size for reading.

New documents name themselves from your first heading instead of staying "Untitled."

⌘⇧M toggles between Document and Markdown view. Note: Zen Mode's shortcut moved to ⌃⌘Z — it was colliding with Redo on ⌘⇧Z, which was worth the one-time muscle-memory reset.

A new setting in General lets you control whether OpenMark remembers recent documents, which affects whether opened files get flagged as quarantined by macOS. If you'd rather avoid that trade-off, you can turn it off.


Fixes Worth Calling Out

  • Links to headings inside a document now scroll to that heading instead of opening a Finder window
  • Double-click in Document view switches you into editing again
  • The share sheet opens instantly — no more multi-second delay
  • Finder Quick Look previews (press Space on a .md file) now use the same rendering engine as the app, so math, GitHub-style alerts, nested lists, wiki links, and frontmatter all look the way they do in OpenMark itself

A few more fixes shipped in this release without us being able to verify them on the original reporters' machines — Apple rejected our TestFlight upload for this build, so we couldn't get a beta in front of them before release:

  • Markdown files stored in Google Drive were showing up greyed out and unselectable on iPhone and iPad. We traced this to a missing file-type declaration and fixed it on our end.
  • Some users hit a crash on launch. We found and addressed a specific cause, but if you're still seeing crashes on startup after updating, please reach out — we want to know.

Under the Hood

The bundled math, diagram, and syntax-highlighting libraries have all been updated, which closes several security advisories in the version we were previously shipping.

Typing in large documents is also roughly 10x faster than it was — syntax highlighting was doing more work per keystroke than it needed to, and that's been substantially reduced.


Pricing and Availability

OpenMark 1.4.1 is available now on the Mac App Store.

$9.99 one-time purchase. Universal Purchase covers macOS, iPhone, and iPad. No subscription. No tiers. You buy it once, you own it forever. Updates are free.

Download OpenMark →