MarkdownViewer

MarkdownViewer Open Markdown files in Visual Studio and read them the way they're meant to be read — as a formatted document, in the full editor window, instead of raw text.

What it does MarkdownViewer registers itself as the default editor for .md and .markdown files. Double-click a Markdown file in Solution Explorer and you get a rendered, read-only preview: real headings, tables, lists, code blocks, and links — not a wall of asterisks and pipes.

It's built for reading. When you open a README, a design doc, or a changelog to find something, you shouldn't have to mentally parse the syntax first.

Features Full-window rendered preview. Not a side-by-side split that halves your reading space — the document gets the whole editor tab. Follows your Visual Studio theme. Background, text, links, code surfaces, and borders are all pulled from the active VS color theme and update the moment you switch themes. Dark, Light, and Blue all look native, with no white flash on open. Live reload. Edit the file in another window, another editor, or pull new commits — the preview re-renders automatically as soon as the file changes on disk. Rich Markdown support. Powered by Markdig with its advanced extension set: pipe and grid tables, task lists, footnotes, definition lists, math, auto-links, custom containers, and more. Read-only by design. The preview never marks the document dirty and never writes to your file. Requirements Visual Studio 2022 (17.0 or later), 64-bit — Community, Professional, or Enterprise .NET Framework 4.7.2 Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, which ships with Visual Studio 2022 and Windows 11 and is almost certainly already installed Usage Just open a .md or .markdown file. There's nothing to configure.

To edit a Markdown file instead of previewing it, right-click it in Solution Explorer and choose Open With… → Source Code (Text) Editor. That dialog's Set as Default button also lets you hand the default back to the text editor at any time, without uninstalling.

Notes If the preview comes up blank with an initialization error, the WebView2 Runtime is missing — install it from Microsoft's WebView2 page and reopen the file.

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