TenLing

TenLing is a calm desktop app for writing, reading, and presenting Markdown. The bet behind it is simple: your files stay plain .md, so they outlive any app — open them anywhere, forever.

Why it exists

Most Markdown tools force a choice: a heavy knowledge base, a split source/preview pane, or a paid single-purpose editor. TenLing is for people who just want to open a file and write. What you see is what you write — headings, lists, tasks, and tables format in place, without syntax staring back at you. And there is no vault: your files live in your folder, portable and plain.

What it does

• Write — a quiet editor that stays out of the way, in light and dark. Bold, italic, headings, lists, tasks, quotes, code, tables, images, and links, from the toolbar or the usual shortcuts.
• Slash commands — type / for a Notion-style menu of blocks: headings, lists, tables, and more.
• Read — rendered preview for when you’re consuming, not composing.
• Present — a Markdown file becomes slides: H1 and H2 headings split the deck. The deck is the document, so there is no separate file to maintain.
• Outline & files — jump between sections from the outline; open a folder and browse the Markdown nearby.
• Find & replace — search the open document with ⌘F / Ctrl+F.
• Export — save as HTML or PDF, or copy as HTML for pasting elsewhere.
• Light & dark — follows the system appearance, or pick a side yourself.
• Auto-updates — new versions arrive signed from GitHub Releases.

Install

One-liners:

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SihanTeng/tenling/main/install.sh | bash

# Windows
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SihanTeng/tenling/main/install.ps1 | iex

Or through a package manager: Homebrew on macOS via its own tap (homebrew-tenling) — brew tap SihanTeng/tenling && brew install --cask tenling — plus APT and DNF repositories, the AUR (tenling-bin), and Chocolatey on Windows. Manual installers (DMG, AppImage, deb, rpm, MSI) are on the releases page.

Shortcuts

Action	macOS	Windows / Linux
New document	⌘N	Ctrl+N
Open	⌘O	Ctrl+O
Save	⌘S	Ctrl+S
Save as	⌘⇧S	Ctrl+Shift+S
Find	⌘F	Ctrl+F
Present	⌘⇧P	Ctrl+Shift+P
Exit present	Esc	Esc
Next / previous slide	→ / ← or Space	same

Under the hood

TenLing is a Tauri app — a small Rust shell around the system web view, so it stays light instead of shipping a whole browser. The editor is TipTap on React, with marked and turndown doing the Markdown round-trip to and from disk; slides in present mode are rendered with Remotion. Releases, installers, and update signatures are built in CI and published on GitHub.