What is paperling?

Paperling is a desktop app for reading and writing markdown files without any setup. You open a .md file and it displays the formatted result right away, while the raw text stays one keystroke away if you want to edit it. The author, a developer who was frustrated opening markdown files in plain text editors and seeing raw symbols instead of formatted text, built Paperling as something lighter than tools like Obsidian, which require vaults, graphs, and plugins even for simple editing. The app renders math equations, chemistry notation, code blocks, and Mermaid diagrams live as you type, and it comes in four visual themes: Dark, Light, Paper, and Dracula. Writing features include a distraction reducing focus mode, a typewriter mode that keeps your cursor centered, slash commands for quickly inserting headings and tables, visual tools for editing tables, find and replace with regular expression support, and smart pasting that turns a link into a proper markdown link or a spreadsheet selection into a formatted table. On the preview side, Paperling supports GitHub flavored markdown, syntax highlighted code blocks, clickable image zooming, task checkboxes that update the underlying file when clicked, and wiki style links between files in the same folder. An optional AI assistant panel lets you chat about the open document, ask it to summarize or find things, or describe an edit in plain language and have the AI propose changes as a colored inline diff that you review and accept or reject one at a time, with nothing written to the file until you approve it. The AI feature works with any OpenAI compatible service, including OpenAI itself, Google Gemini, Ollama, or llama.cpp, so you bring your own model and API key. Paperling is built with Tauri, React, and TypeScript, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.