OMD — Edit documents, not markup

A WYSIWYG editor for .md files that never takes your markdown hostage.

OMD renders markdown as a finished document — callouts, tables, task lists, code, diagrams, charts, comments — and edits it that way. The file on disk stays plain, GitHub-renderable markdown.

One page, top to bottom: every construct above is plain GFM on disk, and every one of them is edited directly in the document.

Open a file, save it without editing, and it comes back byte-for-byte. OMD is a rich view over your markdown, never a separate format converted at save.

That means nothing about your file must become proprietary, diffs stay clean, and the document renders the same on GitHub as it does here. Every construct OMD writes is plain GFM that other tools — and other people — can read.

Same file, same moment. On the right is exactly what's on disk — > [!WARNING], a fenced mermaid block, a pipe table, - [x] task items.

What you get

• Rich rendering of plain GFM — GitHub alert callouts, task-list checkboxes, syntax-highlighted code, Mermaid diagrams, and KaTeX math, all edited inline.
• Smart blocks — insert with /: callouts, collapsible sections, tabs, columns, an interactive chart backed by a real data table, YouTube embeds, image galleries, a live table of contents, dates, footnotes, and link cards with rich URL previews. Each serializes to a form a plain markdown reader still understands.
• Spreadsheet-style tables — overlay controls, move and sort columns and rows, keyboard navigation, and high-fidelity copy/paste to and from Excel, Sheets, and Word.
• Comments — thread a comment on any selection. Comments live in the file and survive every round-trip, so they travel with the document in Git.
• References & backlinks — [[wikilinks]], @mentions, and #issues render as real links, with backlinks across the workspace in the sidebar.
• Export — one-click self-contained HTML; print to PDF from there.
• Wiki-aware — edits a cloned GitHub Wiki's flat page set correctly, including the space↔dash page-name mapping.

Insert a block with /

Type /, keep typing to filter, and the block lands in the document ready to edit — here, a three-column layout that a plain markdown reader still understands.

Tables you can actually edit

Hover any table for overlay controls: drag a column or row to reorder it, sort by a column, insert and remove. The file on disk stays a plain GFM pipe table throughout.

Getting started

1. Open any .md file and run OMD: Open in OMD editor. OMD opens markdown as a document when you ask it to — installing it leaves your editor exactly as it was.
2. Press / in the document for the block menu, or use the toolbar.
3. Want it every time? OMD: Make OMD the default Markdown editor — and OMD: Restore the built-in Markdown editor hands markdown straight back whenever you like. For a single file, OMD: Reopen as plain text drops to plain text without changing anything else.

Starting fresh, run OMD: New document from template… for a document that already exercises the main constructs.

Commands

Requirements

VS Code 1.90 or newer. Nothing else is required — OMD works fully offline out of the box.

The optional AI features additionally need a chat-model provider installed and signed in (such as GitHub Copilot). They are off by default; see below.

Privacy & network use

OMD works fully offline. It makes a network request only when you ask it to:

• Link cards fetch a page's preview metadata (title, description, image) — only when you insert or refresh a card, never automatically on load. The fetched values are cached in your file, so the card renders offline afterward.
• GitHub integration (contributors for @mentions, issues for #references) uses VS Code's built-in GitHub sign-in and is opt-in via OMD: Connect GitHub. On open it only uses an existing session and never prompts.
• AI features are off by default (omd.ai.enabled). With the setting off, OMD never contacts a language model. When enabled, the extension host — never the editor view — makes the call through VS Code's language-model API, only on an explicit action, never on load.

OMD collects no telemetry.

Pre-release

This is an early pre-release.  Bug reports and feedback are very much appreciated — please file issues on the project repository.

License

MIT. Bundled third-party code is listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.