Arto — the Art of Reading Markdown.
A desktop app that renders Markdown the way GitHub does, locally and offline.
Website · Install · CLI · Keybindings · Contributing
Warning
Arto is beta. Features may change without regard to backward compatibility. macOS is the platform it is developed and tested on; Linux and Windows builds exist but are experimental — see Platform support.
Most Markdown tools are built for writing. Arto is built for reading: the name is short for "Art of Reading".
Markdown is where documentation, communication and thinking now live, and reading it deserves more than a preview pane. Arto reproduces GitHub's rendering locally and offline, with typography and whitespace chosen for long reading rather than for editing.
Reading — GitHub-accurate rendering with the extended syntax, auto-reload when the file changes on disk, and no network required.
Getting around — file explorer sidebar with history, bookmarks for the files you keep returning to, an automatic table of contents, and back/forward navigation across linked documents.
Finding — find in page, plus pinned searches that keep multi-colour highlights across sessions.
Windows — one document to a window, as many windows as you like, child windows for diagrams, and drag-and-drop to open.
Rich content — Mermaid diagrams in an interactive viewer with zoom, pan and copy-as-image; KaTeX math; syntax-highlighted code with a copy button; YAML frontmatter as a collapsible table; and GitHub alerts (NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION).
Fitting in — GitHub's own themes, including dimmed, high contrast and the colour-vision ones, with a separate choice for light and dark mode and the system deciding which applies; zoom by keyboard or trackpad, configurable preferences, context menus, and — on macOS — Quick Look and the Finder preview pane.
Diagrams, the sidebar and multi-window in motion: arto-app.github.io
brew install --cask arto-app/tap/arto
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Arto.appLinux packages, a single binary for Linux and Windows, Nix, and why that second line is needed: Installation.
Arto is a GUI application. The arto command hands files to it:
arto README.mdIt also renders a Markdown file to a self-contained HTML page that opens in any browser without the app:
arto page README.md > README.htmlFull flags and behaviour: CLI usage.
- Dioxus — the Rust UI framework the whole application is written in. Native windows, menus and state, no Electron.
- ox-content — the Markdown engine. It renders GitHub's dialect, including autolinks, alerts, heading slugs and the tag filter, so Arto does not carry its own version of any of them.
- KaTeX and Mermaid for math and diagrams, drawn in the page as you reach them.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.
Arto's CI and release builds run on runners provided by Blacksmith through their open source program.
See LICENSE.