MarkdownBlaze

A fast, offline Markdown viewer built with Photino + Blazor and Microsoft Fluent UI on .NET 10. Point it at a .md file and it renders a clean, navigable document — syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, admonitions, a live outline, and history — entirely offline, in a native OS WebView.

📖 The docs/ folder is a self-contained sample wiki that doubles as a feature tour. Open it with MarkdownBlaze docs/index.md.

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Features

Rendering

• CommonMark + extensions via Markdig (UseAdvancedExtensions): tables, task lists, footnotes, definition lists, auto-identifiers, ==highlight==, ~~strikethrough~~, sub/superscript, …
• Syntax highlighting with a bundled highlight.js (all ~190 languages). Light/dark aware.
• Math via bundled KaTeX — inline $…$, display $$…$$, and ```math blocks. Fully offline (fonts vendored).
• Mermaid diagrams — ```mermaid blocks render as live diagrams.
• Admonitions / callouts in Docusaurus (:::tip), MkDocs (!!! note, ??? note), and GitHub/Obsidian (> [!note], collapsible > [!tip]-) syntaxes.
• Emoji shortcodes — :rocket: → 🚀.
• YAML front matter is parsed and hidden.
• Local images are inlined (data URIs) so they load inside the WebView. Everything is offline — no network access.

Obsidian / GitHub flavour

• Wiki links — [[Page]], [[Page|alias]], [[Page#Heading]] navigate in-app; image embeds ![[img.png]] inline; note embeds ![[Note]] become links.
• Tags — #project, #todo/study render as pills (C# and #123 are correctly ignored).
• Comments — Obsidian %%…%% (inline and %%-fenced blocks) are hidden.

Rendering is provided by the standalone bwets.Markdig.Extensions NuGet package.

Links & navigation

• Smart link rewriting relative to the opened file's folder: extension-less links and [[wiki links]] get .md; folder links resolve to index.md.
• Clicking a local Markdown link opens it in-app; external links open in the system browser.
• Back / Forward session history plus a persisted global history.
• Auto-refresh: edit the file and the view reloads automatically.

UI (Fluent)

• Resizable, pinnable sidebar with three tabs — Headers (outline), Session history, Global history. Preferences are remembered.
• Toolbar: sidebar toggle, Back, Forward, Refresh, Print, Open containing folder, and a ⋮ menu → Settings.
• History rows show the page title (path in a tooltip) with a right-click menu: Open, Open in new window, Copy filename, Open containing folder.
• Light / Dark / System theme (Settings), driven by Fluent design tokens.
• Remembers window size, position & maximized state between runs (maximized on first launch).

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Alt + ← / Alt + →	Back / Forward
F5 / Ctrl + R	Refresh
Ctrl + P	Print
Ctrl + B	Toggle sidebar

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Getting started

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK
• Windows: the WebView2 Runtime (preinstalled on current Windows)
• Linux: WebKitGTK + GTK — webkit2gtk-4.1 and gtk3 (Arch/CachyOS: sudo pacman -S --needed gtk3 webkit2gtk-4.1 dbus)

Build & run

dotnet run --project src/MarkdownBlaze -- "docs/index.md"

Releases & packaging

Prebuilt, self-contained binaries (Windows zip/installer/MSIX, Linux tar.gz/.deb/.pkg.tar.zst, macOS .dmg) are produced by the manual release workflow. On Linux, packaging/linux/install-linux.sh installs a .desktop entry and registers MarkdownBlaze as the default .md handler.

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Tech stack

• .NET 10, PhotinoX.Blazor (native OS WebView host), Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor
• Markdig + bwets.Markdig.Extensions for Markdown → HTML
• highlight.js + Mermaid + KaTeX (bundled offline) running in the WebView

Project layout

docs/                       Sample wiki / feature showcase
src/
  MarkdownBlaze/
    Program.cs              Photino + Blazor host
    App.razor               Root (theme, view switch)
    ViewerView.razor        Toolbar + sidebar + content
    SettingsView.razor      Settings page
    Services/               Rendering, navigation/history, file-watch, JS interop
    wwwroot/                Host page, app.css/js, offline highlight.js + mermaid + katex
  packaging/                Linux .desktop/.deb/PKGBUILD, Windows installer/MSIX, macOS .app/.dmg

License

Personal project — all rights reserved unless stated otherwise.