read-only markdown viewer
縁側 A quiet porch for the Markdown your AI writes.
Sit on the engawa — the veranda beside the house where your AI works — and watch the documents it generates, without touching them.
Editing is the AI's job. Reading is yours.
why a porch
Generated fast.
Nowhere calm to read it.
Coding assistants write Markdown by the pageful — specs, plans, handover notes, reviews. The terminal is a poor place to take that in, and opening it in an editor puts you one keystroke away from changing the AI's work. Engawa is the third window: the one you only read from.
Nothing to break
Engawa has no write APIs at all — nothing that creates, edits, renames, moves or deletes. Not a mode you switch off: the capability simply isn't in the app. It reads under the folders you pick, and that is the whole of what it can do.
It sits beside the work
Park it next to your terminal and leave it there. When the AI rewrites a file, the page updates in place and keeps your scroll position — you carry on reading the paragraph you were on, instead of hunting for it again.
All of it spent on reading
With no editing UI to build, everything goes into taking documents in: two panes side by side, a heading outline, per-pane find, diagrams you can enlarge, and printing that comes out light even when you read in the dark.
see it running
Light or dark.
One pane, or two.
Pick a view below to enlarge it. Real screenshots of Engawa reading its own README and requirements document.
Front matter folds away · Mermaid renders inline · your scroll position survives every reload.
what it does
Everything for reading.
Nothing for editing.
Nine things a reading pane owes you — and not one command that can alter a file.
Watches and reloads
The moment the AI rewrites a file, the view updates and your scroll position is kept. Parent-directory watching means atomic renames — how most tools save — never slip past it.
Safe by design
No write APIs at all. It reads under the folders you choose and nowhere else; even its own settings and session live in app data, never in your documents.
Two panes
Open a second document on the right to compare — spec beside implementation notes, plan beside handover. Drag the divider to rebalance; find works on the focused pane.
GFM-style rendering
Tables, task lists, footnotes, syntax highlighting, foldable front matter — and Mermaid diagrams drawn inline. Raw HTML is sanitized with DOMPurify before it ever reaches the page.
Diagrams you can read
A wide flowchart shrinks to fit the pane — so click it. Any Mermaid diagram opens full-window with zoom, and code blocks carry a copy button.
Find your place
A heading outline for long documents, and find within the focused pane. Links between your files resolve and open in Engawa — a docs tree stays a docs tree.
Many ways in
Drop a .md or a whole folder onto the window. Double-click a .md in Finder or Explorer. Add several root folders and filter the tree by name.
Print what you're reading
⌘P / Ctrl+P sends the focused pane to your system print dialog — light on paper even if you read in dark, with diagrams kept whole on the page. PDF is whatever your OS's print panel makes.
Quiet by default
Offline, no telemetry, no account, no background updater. Light / dark / auto, English or Japanese, and your open files, pane widths and scroll positions come back when you launch it again.
get it
Put the porch beside your desk.
Free, on both platforms. One download, no installer wizardry, nothing to sign up for.
macOS
StablemacOS 11 or later · Apple Silicon (M1 and later). Opens straight away — the build is signed and notarized by Apple.
Download for macOS (DMG, 5 MB)Windows
BetaWindows 10 / 11 · x64. Installs for your user only — no administrator rights. Same version, same features; a little younger than the macOS build.
Download for Windows (3 MB)- Install and launch it — on macOS, drag
Engawa.appto/Applications. - Drop the folder your AI writes into onto the window — or use Add Folder. Add as many roots as you like.
- Leave it open beside your terminal. From here on it follows the files by itself.
Small print: what to expect on first run, and what isn't done yet
On macOS
Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple: no security dialog, nothing to work around.
On Windows
- The build isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows a warning the first time: choose More info → Run anyway. Signing is on the list, just not at the top of it.
- Microsoft Defender briefly flagged the unsigned installer by machine-learning heuristic. We reported it and Microsoft removed the detection (31 Aug 2026). If an old definition file still trips, update your definitions.
- Known bug: printing while the app is in Dark appearance renders Mermaid diagrams as their source text. Switch Appearance to Light before printing; a fix is coming in the next patch.
- Smaller edges: print from File ▸ Print… rather than the browser engine's own Ctrl+P; Ctrl+Shift+W doesn't reach the app while the document has focus (use the menu); a second instance can start from a file association; very long paths (over 260 characters) show in verbatim form and UNC paths aren't supported.
Both platforms
- No auto-update. Nothing runs in the background to check for versions — come back to this page when you want to see if there's a newer one.
- Rendering is GFM-style, not a byte-for-byte match of GitHub. Very large files degrade gracefully: past a threshold Engawa shows plain text with a banner rather than freezing.
- Engawa is proprietary software, free to use. The licence covers both the macOS and the Windows build.