product
Margin is for humans and agents jointly examining Markdown artifacts. Its users include focused writers, software architects, engineers, designers, researchers, technical note-takers, and creative collaborators of every kind whose working medium is Markdown. They need to read closely, edit precisely, and exchange durable feedback without moving the source into a proprietary document system. Humans work in the native Mac interface. Agents use the same comment model through a deterministic command-line interface.
Margin makes a Markdown file a calm shared workspace. It opens a file or directory almost immediately, preserves the literal source while making its structure legible, offers an exceptionally readable view, and attaches threaded discussions to exact passages. Comments live inside the Markdown file in an ignorable, standards-informed envelope, so the document remains portable, diffable, scriptable, and understandable without Margin.
Success means that opening, reading, editing, reviewing, and handing a document between a human and an agent all feel like one continuous workflow. The document stays authoritative.
Quiet, exact, tactile. Margin should feel composed and trustworthy under sustained use. Feedback is immediate but restrained. The interface recedes until the user needs the tree, the markup, or the discussion around a passage.
Margin must not resemble a heavy IDE, a project-management dashboard, a browser-hosted office suite, or a distracting WYSIWYG editor. Avoid startup ceremony, decorative chrome, card grids, novelty controls, hidden source markup, noisy badges, ornamental motion, and features that turn a document into an account-bound service.
- The document is the protocol. Source, annotations, and history must remain portable and inspectable.
- Fast is a feature users can feel. Launch, navigation, typing, selection, saving, and comment operations respond without ceremony.
- Literal, but legible. Preserve every Markdown character while using typography and color to reveal structure.
- Conversation has an address. Every comment has a resilient textual anchor, a stable identity, and a clear thread.
- Humans and agents are equal collaborators. Anything essential in the interface also has a deterministic, machine-readable command-line path.
- Reading deserves its own atmosphere. Reader mode removes editing noise and gives prose a measured, comfortable page.
Margin follows the Mac's current appearance and accessibility settings. Core workflows support keyboard-only use, VoiceOver labels and navigation, increased contrast, reduced motion, and sufficient non-color indications for selection, focus, comment state, and errors. Text size is adjustable, reader width is bounded, and no essential state depends only on hue.