Thorpe app icon Thorpe

Coder friendly semi-WYSIWYG Markdown editor

Single editable view where your Markdown formats as you type.

No split panes, no preview toggling.

OSX native, tiny (2MB) and fast (150ms load time)

Download Thorpe
Thorpe editing demo.md - headings, bold, italic, links and task lists all formatting live in one editable window
Thorpe editing api.md - a developer guide with a syntax-highlighted HTTP code block, a caution callout and a table
Thorpe editing prd.md - a product requirements doc with a note callout and footnotes
Thorpe editing trip.md - a trip plan with an inline photograph and a booking table
Thorpe editing journal.md - a daily journal with checkboxes and inline hex colour swatches
Thorpe editing chapter.md - a novel chapter with a blockquote, a horizontal rule and a footnote
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Formats as you type

One kind-of WYSIWYG window. Headings, bold, italic, links, tables and lists render live - while the source stays right there, editable.

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Great for coders

From AppleScript to Zsh - over 150 languages supported with syntax highlighting.

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Native macOS

A fast, focused, single-window app that feels at home on your Mac.

Thorpe /θɔːp/ noun

The back half of octothorpe - a name for #, the character that starts every Markdown heading.

Coined at Bell Labs in the 1960s, when # and * joined the new touch-tone keypad. The octo- counts the symbol's eight points. The -thorpe nobody agrees on, but could be a reference to...

  1. Jim Thorpe. Engineer Don Macpherson was campaigning to get the athlete's Olympic medals back from Sweden.
  2. A joke. Colleagues coined it as octatherp, picking an awkward th to trip up non-English speakers.
  3. Eight fields round a village. Thorp is Old Norse for a hamlet, as in Scunthorpe. Tidy - and almost certainly invented afterwards.