Writing in Markdown has become an essential skill for many tech professionals and enthusiasts in the last few years. Markdown is now being actively used on big, popular sites such as GitHub, ReadTheDocs, and even the Linux man-pages. A huge part of open source documentation are written in Markdown or some Markdown flavor.
Being able to quickly view rendered Markdown is crucial for productivity. This article is a list of the best 5 Markdown viewer for Chrome that you can install and quickly preview .md files.
Markdown Preview Plus
Markdown Preview Plus is a nifty little Chrome extension that allows you to render Markdown-formatted documents into HTML right inside your browser. Besides Markdown, the extension also supports previewing plain text and reStructured Text files.
The Markdown preview also includes a Table of Contents and supports live-reload every time the source file changes.
After installation, you have to give Markdown Preview Plus access to the URLs so that it can automatically detect a .md or .markdown file. To do that, right-click the extension icon in the in the toolbar and then select Manage Extensions.
Scroll down until you see Allow Access to File URLs and toggle the switch to the On position.
Now that Markdown Preview Plus is fully set up, you can drag any Markdown-formatted file into the browser to preview it.
Please note that auto-reloading and Table of Contents features are disabled by default, you have to manually enable it through Markdown Preview Plus options page.
If you have math equation or diagrams in Markdown files, the extension can render them using KaTeX and Mermaid as well.
Markdown Viewer
Markdown Viewer is an open source Markdown viewer extension that supports rendering both local and remote files, automatically detect Markdown files using either RegExp or Content-Type header.
In order to process local files, you have to enable Allow Access to File URLs in Chrome extension management page like you would with Markdown Preview Plus. For remote files, you must add its origin (domain) into the whitelist, using Markdown Viewer settings page.
Markdown Viewer can process files with several advanced content options, namely Syntax highlighted code blocks, Auto-Reload file contents, Table of Contents, TeX/LaTeX math blocks using MathJax, Mermaid diagrams, Emoji support via EmojiOne, Remember scroll position.
Markdown Viewer can be used with any markdown parser/compiler. Currently the following compilers are implemented: marked, remark, showdown, markdown-it, remarkable, commonmark, markdown-js. Detailed information about can be found at More Compilers.
Viewdown
Viewdown is another extension that allows Markdown files to be previewed in Chrome. It supports rendering both local and remote files, as long as it belongs to one of the following formats: .md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .mkd, .mdwn, .mdtxt, .mdtext, .text. The look and feel of Viewdown can be changes with its themes.
Please note that you have to enable Allow Access to File URLs in Chrome extension management page in order to view local files.
Markdown Preview Plus Dz
Markdown Preview Plus Dz is a fork of Markdown Preview Plus with a few improvements while keeping most of the original features.
Improvements based on the original version includes:
- Added a theme file and optimized table display
- Automatic Table of Contents based on heading levels, the TOC will be hidden automatically when printing.
Important: After installation, please go to the extension management to turn on Allow access to the file URL, otherwise Markdown Preview Plus Dz cannot automatically detect and render Markdown files.
Markdown Preview Plus Dz on Chrome Webstore
MD Reader
MD Reader is another simple Markdown file reader extension for Chrome. It supports viewing files with file://, http://, https:// URL and .md, .mkd, *.markdown extension.
Your document will be viewed with a Table of Contents comprised of heading levels in the sidebar. There’s a little “eye” button on top that allows you to quickly toggle between raw markdown and rendered document.
After installation, please go to the extension management to turn on Allow access to the file URL, otherwise MD Reader won’t be able to detect and render Markdown files. For remote files, MD Reader works right out of the box.
