Editing modes

Markion has four view modes, with Visual Edit as the default. Cycle through them with a shortcut, or jump straight to one. Ctrl+Shift+V / Ctrl+/ / Ctrl+E / Ctrl+P / Ctrl+R.

Switching modes preserves the active document, cursor and selection, undo history, and per-tab scroll state—changing views never interrupts your train of thought.

Edit

A focused raw Markdown source editor. No decoration—just precise, predictable text editing: syntax elements are tinted softly, and selections, find-and-replace, and formatting commands all operate directly on the source.

Visual Edit

A WYSIWYG-first, source-backed editing surface. Prose stays rendered while the necessary syntax reveals itself progressively when you need it. These constructs have exact direct editors:

Ordinary fenced-code payloads
Block math
Registered diagrams (Mermaid)
Inline image fields
GFM table cells

The source contract

Visual Edit is not a separate rich-text document model—the underlying Markdown is always the source of truth, and every visual action resolves to one exact source-backed mutation. Constructs whose WYSIWYG rendering is not yet implemented—decoded YAML front matter, indented code, and malformed or byte-ambiguous syntax—keep an exact source-backed editing affordance as a transitional measure, tracked on the WYSIWYG coverage roadmap; block reordering is offered only when non-overlapping source boundaries are provable.

Slash commands and the block menu

Type / to open the slash-command palette, or right-click a block for the compact block context menu. Both offer exact block-level operations:

Block transforms: paragraph, headings, lists, quote, fenced code, divider, table
Duplicate, move up/down, source-safe drag reorder, and delete

The selection-contextual formatting toolbar and the visual link editor likewise perform one exact source-backed mutation per action.

Split Preview

Source and rendered preview side by side. An optional Sync scroll setting keeps both panes on the same document location using the source map, rather than scrolling by whole-document percentage—so in long documents both panes always point at the same content.

Read

A rendered, non-editing view with the tools put away. By default the content is centered at a readable 860 px maximum width; the Preview adaptive width preference lets it use the full pane instead.