LeanMD vs. everything else

1. 01

   LeanMD

   Opens a .md file. Shows you the headings, the table, the code block. You read it. You close it. Your day continues. It's one small app. No account, no extensions, no subscription. It won't become a second brain, a workspace or a personality.

2. 02

   Cursor, Windsurf and the AI editor of the week

   Brilliant for building. You opened PLAN.md just to read it, and now there's a sidebar offering to improve it, refactor it and explain it to you. You just wanted to read it. LeanMD has no sidebar and no opinions.

3. 03

   VS Code

   You open a folder. You answer the workspace trust prompt. Extensions wake up and something starts indexing. You press Ctrl+Shift+V and there's your preview, in a pane, beside a tab, under a sidebar. LeanMD has no workspace trust prompt, because it has no workspace.

4. 04

   "Just show it to me again" (the AI chat)

   You paste the Markdown back into the chat so the model can render it for you. It helpfully improves it while it's there. You now have two versions and trust neither. LeanMD shows the file you actually have.

5. 05

   GitHub

   Commit. Push. Open the browser. Find the repo. Find the file. There's your rendered README. LeanMD rendered it before you finished writing the commit message.

6. 06

   Chrome (and its 87 other tabs)

   Drag the .md into a new tab and you get raw text in a tiny font, in tab number 88. We've seen how you use tabs. Every one of them is "for later". That's why LeanMD holds up to 128 documents at once: we wanted you to feel at home. Close all other tabs is one right-click away. You won't click it. We know.

7. 07

   Discord

   Paste it into a DM to yourself. Headings and code blocks look great. The table turns into a wall of pipes. You screenshot it anyway.

8. 08

   Notion

   Import the .md. It becomes blocks, on a page, in a workspace, in a teamspace. Need the file back? Export, download, unzip. LeanMD has no blocks. It has your file, still where you saved it.

9. 09

   Obsidian

   A vault. A graph. A daily note. A community plugin to tweak the other plugins. You opened it to read one file your agent wrote, and now you have a vault. LeanMD has no graph. You can leave when you're done.

10. 10

    Windows Notepad

    Notepad finally learned Markdown on Windows 11. Genuinely, congratulations to Notepad. It still has no outline and no side-by-side source and preview, and it isn't coming to the Windows 10 laptop you got from work. LeanMD is.

11. 11

    Any Electron app

    A whole browser engine, shipped inside the app, so it can show you some headings. LeanMD uses what Windows already has. It doesn't ship a browser. The download is one file.

12. 12

    Reading the raw text

    Your brain can render Markdown. It just shouldn't have to. Counting pipes to work out which column you're in is not a skill employers are asking for.

13. 13

    LeanMD (again, because fair is fair)

    It doesn't show images. It does tick boxes now, and counts them, but it will never turn your checklist into a productivity system. There's no plugin store, no themes marketplace, no sync, no mobile app and no AI sidebar. The preview is native and deliberately limited. If you want a second brain, this is the wrong app. If you want to open the .md your agent just wrote, check the table, fix the typo and get back to shipping, this is the app. It's lean. That's the point. It has never once asked you to rate it.

All in good fun. Every product named here is good at what it was built for, and most of them do far more than LeanMD. Descriptions reflect each product's usual out-of-the-box behaviour as of November 2026. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; LeanMD isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.