One viewer, three ways to read: appearance profiles in Markko

The same Markdown file gets read in different situations. In the morning it is a long spec you read alone. At eleven it is on a shared screen in a meeting. In the afternoon it is a technical note full of code that you check line by line. One look does not fit all three.

Markko has appearance profiles for this. A profile is a saved set of appearance settings. You switch between profiles with a shortcut, ⌃1 to ⌃4, and the whole window changes at once. This post explains what a profile stores and how three profiles cover most of a working day.

What a profile stores

A profile holds the settings that decide how a document looks:

• Theme. Markko has 12 themes, each with a light and a dark variant.
• Fonts. The typeface for the text.
• Size. The base text size.
• Line height. How much air there is between lines.
• Column width. How wide the text column is.
• Code font. The monospaced typeface for code blocks and inline code.

A profile does not touch the document. Markko is read-only and never changes the Markdown file. A profile only changes how the file is drawn on your screen.

Reading

The Reading profile is for long text you read alone: specs, design documents, articles, notes.

Good reading settings are well known from books and the web. A column that is not too wide, so your eye finds the next line easily. Generous line height. A comfortable text size. A calm theme. The aim is that you can read for twenty minutes without getting tired or losing your place.

This is the profile to stay in most of the time.

Presenting

The Presenting profile is for showing a document to other people: on a projector, a meeting room screen, or a shared window in a video call.

What works at arm’s length does not work across a room, or squeezed into a small video tile. Presenting calls for larger text and strong contrast. People at the back should be able to read a heading without squinting, and a compressed video stream should not turn the text to mush.

Switching to it takes one shortcut. When the meeting ends, another shortcut takes you back to Reading. You do not have to remember what your settings were before.

Code Review

The Code Review profile is for technical documents: files with many code blocks, config snippets, command lines or diffs.

Here the code is the main content, not a side note. That shifts the priorities. A wider column means fewer wrapped code lines. A code font you trust matters, one where 0 and O, or 1 and l, are easy to tell apart. A tighter layout shows more lines at once.

This profile pairs well with line numbers, which Markko can show, so you can point a colleague to an exact place in the file.

Why profiles instead of settings

You could change these settings by hand each time. In practice, nobody does. Opening settings before a meeting to raise the font size, then lowering it again afterwards, is just enough work that you put up with the wrong look instead.

Profiles remove that step. The decision “how should a document look when I present” is made once, calmly, and then reused. During the day you only press a key.

Profiles are also different from zoom. Markko has zoom from 50 % to 300 %, and it is the right tool for a quick adjustment. Zoom makes everything bigger or smaller. A profile changes the character of the page: another theme, another column width, another font. The two work together.

Making them your own

The three profiles here are starting points for three kinds of reading. Your own situations may differ. Maybe you want a dark profile for the evening, or one for a large external display and one for the laptop screen. The settings a profile stores, listed above, are the ones to think about:

1. Start with the situation. Where will you read, and how far away is the screen?
2. Pick the theme for the light in that situation.
3. Set size and line height until reading feels easy.
4. Set the column width. Narrower for prose, wider for code and tables.
5. Choose the code font last, with a real code block on screen.

Availability

Appearance profiles are part of the free version of Markko, together with the 12 themes, light and dark mode, and zoom. Markko is a free download on the Mac App Store for macOS 14 or later. It works offline, without an account.