Thank you for being an alpha tester. This guide explains what Cordelia is, how to use it, and — just as importantly — what it deliberately is not. If you find yourself missing a feature, check the second half of this guide before filing it as a bug: some absences are the product.
What Cordelia Is
Cordelia is a native macOS editor for writers who work in markdown. It is named for the daughter in King Lear — the one who wouldn’t dress up her meaning.
The idea is simple: the text you write is the text you see. There is no preview pane, no split view, no “rendered” mode. Markdown formatting appears directly in the editor as you type it — bold turns bold, headings turn bold with their # marks tinted, code gets a subtle background — while every character you typed stays visible and editable. The syntax markers fade to a quiet gray instead of disappearing, so you always know exactly what’s in your file.
Your files are plain markdown text. Nothing is embedded, nothing is proprietary, nothing is stored anywhere except where you save them. Anything Cordelia can open, any other text editor can open too.
Working with documents
Cordelia behaves like a proper Mac document app, because it is one:
- Each document opens in its own window. Open as many as you like.
- Autosave, rename from the title bar, drag the proxy icon, revert to previous versions, Open Recent — all standard, all there.
- At launch you get the familiar Open panel with a New Document button, not a mystery untitled window.
- Closing with unsaved changes asks; quitting reviews anything unsaved. macOS handles this, so it works the way every other Mac app does.
Writing
- The editor holds your text to a comfortable ~66-character measure, centered like a page. The window can be any size; the text column stays readable.
- A word count sits quietly in the corner. It counts words — markdown syntax, list markers, and fence lines don’t inflate it.
- Formatting shortcuts: ⌘B bold, ⌘I italic, ⌘⌥1/2/3 for headings. These insert the markdown syntax at your cursor or around your selection — they’re typing assistance, not a rich-text mode.
- Find: ⌘F, the standard macOS find bar.
Markdown that renders live
Bold (** or __), italic (* or _), strikethrough (~~), headings H1–H6, ordered and unordered lists (nested up to five levels), blockquotes, inline code, and fenced code blocks.
Two things worth knowing:
- Inside code — spans or fenced blocks — markdown syntax renders literally. Your code samples won’t get accidentally bolded.
- Headings render bold at body size; the
#marks carry the hierarchy, tinted more mutedly as the level deepens. This is by design — a wall of font sizes is a distraction, and you can always see the level because the marks never hide.
Spell checking
Cordelia flags likely typos with the standard macOS red squiggle, using the same system spell checker as every other Mac app. Right-click a flagged word for suggestions.
What it will never do is change your text. Autocorrect is off. Text replacement is off. Smart quotes and smart dashes are off. Grammar nagging is off. The squiggle is information, not intervention — what you typed stays typed.
One nicety: if your documents carry YAML frontmatter (a --- metadata block at the top), Cordelia knows keys like slug: and toc: aren’t misspelled English and leaves them unflagged.
Export ⇧⌘E
File > Export as PDF… (or Export as HTML…) produces a typeset document meant for sharing — built for the critique-group use case:
- Serif type at readable size, generous line spacing, one-inch margins with an extra-wide right margin for handwritten annotations.
- Optional line numbers in the margin (a checkbox in the save panel), so feedback can say “line 142” instead of “that paragraph near the middle.”
- PDF pages get centered page numbers. YAML frontmatter is left out of the export entirely.
The editor shows your working text; the export is the clean copy you hand to readers. That’s the intended division of labor.
What Cordelia Isn’t
Every item below is a decision, not a gap.
It is not a word processor. There are no fonts to choose, no colors, no styles, no rulers. If a document needs those, it isn’t a markdown document, and there are excellent tools for it.
It is not a preview app. There is no rendered HTML view, no split pane. The editor’s live formatting is the preview. If you need to see final typeset output, that’s what Export is for.
It is not a notes system. No library, no folders-in-app, no tags, no linking between notes, no search across documents. Cordelia edits files; Finder organizes them. It will not try to become the place where all your text lives.
It is not a cloud service. No accounts, no sync, no collaboration, no telemetry. Your files are on your disk (or in your own iCloud Drive/Dropbox folder, which works fine — they’re just files).
It does not implement all of markdown. Links, images, tables, footnotes, and task lists don’t get live styling — they stay as plain text, exactly as you typed them, and remain valid markdown for whatever processes your files later. Cordelia renders the subset a prose writer reaches for while typing; it doesn’t try to be a CommonMark reference implementation.
It will not touch your text. No autocorrect, no auto-capitalization, no smart punctuation, no automatic list continuation, no “helpful” substitutions of any kind. Every character in your file is one you typed. This is the closest thing Cordelia has to a sacred rule.
It is not extensible. No plugins, no themes, no settings labyrinth. If configuration is the hobby you want, this is the wrong app — the intended experience is: open, write, close.
Alpha Notes
Practical details worth knowing while you test:
- Requirements: macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. Cordelia's editor uses JetBrains Mono, which is bundled with the app. The UI itself uses the system font.
- Very large documents: formatting re-applies over the whole document after each typing pause. On multi-thousand-line files you may eventually notice a small hitch; if you do, the document length and where you felt it is genuinely useful feedback.
- Deep lists: nesting is capped at five levels.
- Code blocks and spell check: code inside fences is still spell-checked, so unusual identifiers can pick up squiggles. Known, on the list.
- Spell check timing (macOS beta bug): on current macOS betas, the system spell checker doesn't flag typos live as you type — squiggles appear when a document is opened or reopened. This is an OS-level regression (it reproduces outside Cordelia's code); it should resolve with a macOS update, and we retest on each one.
Reporting problems
The most useful bug report is: the text that caused it (or a minimal sample), what you expected, and what happened instead. Since files are plain markdown, attaching the actual file is usually the fastest route.
If Cordelia ever changes text you didn’t type over, that’s the highest-severity bug the project recognizes. Please report it with everything you can remember.
Cordelia is under active development. What it isn’t today, it mostly won’t be tomorrow either — the restraint is the roadmap.