A Markdown note-taking app that types it for you
Keep the muscle memory, lose the syntax. In Locus, Markdown becomes real formatting as you finish the keystroke — and comes back out as clean .md whenever you want it.
Markdown's genius is speed: your hands never leave the keys to format. Its tax is the screen full of asterisks. Locus keeps the first and drops the second — type the syntax, get the formatting, never read the markup. Underneath, everything stays portable: Markdown in, Markdown out, on a workspace that never leaves your Mac.
What expands as you type
Plus / for every block type and @ to link pages — the non-Markdown half of the vocabulary.
Markdown in, Markdown out
Moving in: point File → Import at a folder of .md files — from Obsidian, Bear, a Notion export, or a decade of loose notes — and each becomes a page of native blocks. Moving out: export any page or the whole workspace back to Markdown, HTML, or PDF. That two-way door is a core promise, not an afterthought; the local-first notes page explains why. Coming from a files-first editor? The Obsidian comparison is the honest read.
Questions people ask
Is my writing stored as Markdown files?+
The workspace is one human-readable JSON file (blocks carry more structure than Markdown holds — checkbox state, table columns, covers). Markdown is the doorway: import folders of .md files and export any page, or the whole workspace, back to Markdown at any time.
Why hide the syntax at all?+
Because syntax is for machines and muscle memory, not for reading. You keep the speed of typing Markdown and lose the visual noise of living inside it. Prefer seeing raw text forever? A files-first tool like Obsidian may fit better — see the comparison.
Does pasted Markdown convert?+
Yes — paste a chunk of Markdown and it becomes native blocks: headings, lists, to-dos, quotes, code. Copying blocks out produces Markdown with inline formatting preserved, so round-trips are clean.
Which code languages are highlighted?+
Eighteen, including Swift, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Rust, Go, C, Java, HTML/CSS, SQL, and shell — colored by themes that match the app's canvas.
Free while in development · macOS 14 or later