Your first document
Open a file
There are several ways to open a document:
- File ▸ Open… (⌘O) and pick a file.
- Drag a
.mdor.mdxfile onto the Twain window. - Double-click a Markdown file in Finder, once Twain is your default viewer.
- Press the spacebar on a file in Finder for a Quick Look preview without opening the app at all.
The open panel accepts .md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd, .mkdn, .mdx, and .txt files, and
you can select more than one at a time. Each open document appears in the sidebar under Open.
Choose how you read it
Every document can be shown three ways. Switch with the toolbar control in the centre of the window, the View menu, or these shortcuts:
| View | Shortcut | Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Rendered | ⌘1 | The formatted document |
| Raw Source | ⌘2 | The plain Markdown or MDX text, with syntax highlighting |
| Side by Side | ⌘3 | Source and rendered output together |
By default a document opens read-only in the rendered view. That is all you need to read and navigate. Editing is a separate, optional mode covered in The editor.
Find your way around
- The Contents section in the sidebar is a live table of contents built from the document's headings. Click a heading to jump to it. See Table of contents.
- Find in Document (⌘F) searches within the open file.
- The status bar along the bottom shows the format, a word count, and an estimated reading time.
Make it comfortable
Use the reading-settings menu in the toolbar to change the appearance (System, Light or Dark), the reading theme, the font, the reading width, and the text size. The Sepia and High Contrast themes are Twain Pro features; the rest of the menu is free. Text size also responds to ⌘=, ⌘-, and ⌘0. See Reading settings.
What Twain understands
Twain renders standard Markdown plus GitHub Flavoured Markdown, footnotes, frontmatter, maths, diagrams, alerts, and MDX components. The Markdown and MDX section documents each in turn, and the syntax cheat sheet is a quick one-page reference.