Open an .md file in your browser
Drop the file below to read it rendered or as source, then export it as PDF, HTML or plain text. Nothing is uploaded — the file is read and rendered on your own machine.
Drop a .md file here
Accepts .md, .markdown, .mdx, .txt and files with no extension. If it reads as text, it will open.
What this does
It opens a Markdown file and shows you the formatted document, the raw source, or both in turn. Headings become a clickable outline for anything longer than a screen, front matter is shown as its own block rather than dumped into the body, and tables, code fences, task lists and links all render. When you are done you can export the result as PDF, HTML or plain text.
There is nothing to install and no account. It is the same renderer embedded in our complete guide to the .md file format, pulled out into a page of its own because most people who land on that guide arrived holding a file, not a question.
Nothing leaves your device
The file is read in the browser with the File API and never transmitted. There is no upload endpoint, no server-side rendering step, and nothing is logged about the file's name or its contents. You can verify this yourself: open your browser's network panel, drop a file in, and watch that no request is made.
This matters more than it used to. The files people most often need to open — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, a draft brand.md, an internal runbook — are frequently the ones that should not be pasted into a stranger's web form.
One honest limit: the page is not a offline app. It needs to load once from the network like any other web page. After it has loaded, the file you open never goes anywhere.
Opening .md files without a browser
Markdown was designed to be legible unrendered, so the fastest option is usually to just open it as text. Per platform:
| Platform | What opens it |
|---|---|
| Windows | Notepad opens it as text. VS Code renders it with Ctrl+Shift+V. |
| macOS | TextEdit opens it as text. VS Code renders it with Cmd+Shift+V; Quick Look needs a plugin. |
| Linux | Any text editor. glow or bat render it in the terminal. |
| Android / iOS | Most text editor apps open it as plain text. Renaming to .txt makes it open anywhere. |
If the file opens as binary gibberish, it is not Markdown. The .md extension is also used by Sega Mega Drive ROM images, GCC machine-description files and a handful of other formats — the guide covers how to tell them apart.
Converting .md to PDF, HTML or plain text
PDF goes through your browser's own print pipeline rather than a bundled PDF library. That keeps the page small and the typography correct, with one consequence worth knowing: page breaks follow the print stylesheet, so a long table may split across pages. Choose "Save as PDF" as the destination in the print dialog.
HTML downloads as a single self-contained file with its styles inlined — no external stylesheet, so it renders the same anywhere you open it.
Plain text strips the Markdown syntax and keeps the words, which is what you want when pasting into a system that will mangle the formatting anyway.
If your file is an agent context file
A growing share of the .md files people open are not documentation for humans at all. They are instructions for software:
AGENTS.mdtells coding agents how to work in a project — setup, conventions, what not to touch. It is read natively by a long list of agent tools.CLAUDE.mdis the same idea in Claude Code's own format.llms.txtsits at a website's root and points at the content the owner considers important. Whether anything reads it is a question with an evidence-based answer, and it is not the one the industry has been selling — 137,000 sites' server logs say otherwise.brand.mdis the emerging pattern for giving agents the brand rules that currently live in a PDF nobody's software can read.
All four are the same move: putting the context a system needs into a plain-text file a person can still review. Our note on why .md became the context format covers why that shape won.