Stop pasting your work into a chatbot.

Start More than an editor

Markelangelo looks like a beautiful markdown editor — and it is one. But what it really gives you is a sovereign writing workshop: a place to draft, interrogate and reshape documents with AI that works inside the page, on your own terms.

Everyone who writes serious documents does the same exhausting shuffle: draft in one window, paste into a chatbot in another, copy the answer back, re-fix the formatting, repeat. Markelangelo ends it. Your prompts become reusable tools that run inside your document and apply in place — and because they run on your own keys or a local model, your work never leaves your machine. See how the AI workshop works →

Why it's different

Who it's for

Writers, researchers, consultants, note-takers and developers who want a fast, focused editor and a real AI workshop — without surrendering their data to someone else's servers. If you value owning your words as much as writing them, this was built for you.

START Getting started

From download to your first saved document in just a few minutes.

Install & first launch

Markelangelo ships as an unsigned installer, so Windows SmartScreen may greet the first run with a warning. This is expected — the app simply isn't code-signed yet, not unsafe.

1. Run the downloaded installer. If SmartScreen appears, click More info, then Run anyway.
2. Let the installer finish, then launch Markelangelo. A one-time welcome tour introduces the essentials.

Create & open documents

1. Press Ctrl+N to create a fresh document and start writing straight away.
2. Press Ctrl+O to open an existing markdown file from anywhere on your disk.
3. Choose File ▸ Open Folder to open a whole workspace folder. This populates the file-tree sidebar and — importantly — powers wiki-links ([[note]]) and folder-wide search.

Save your work

1. Press Ctrl+S to save the current document. New documents will ask where to put the file the first time.
2. Prefer to never think about it? Enable autosave in settings and Markelangelo writes changes to disk for you as you go.

Everything you save is plain markdown, exactly where you put it — ready to back up, sync or version however you like.

The headline feature AI comments: argue with your own draft

The AI stops lecturing you from a side-panel. It pins its notes to the exact sentences they're about — right in the margin, like comments beside a Word document — and each one becomes a conversation you can have, and settle, without ever leaving the page.

From passive critique to an action you take

Ask a chatbot to critique your work and you get a wall of prose that you then have to map, by hand, back onto your own sentences. Markelangelo's review prompts — Devil's advocate, Evidence check and Clarity & concision — do that mapping for you. Each remark is anchored to the exact span it concerns, so you can see at a glance what needs attention, and precisely where.

Talk it through, then commit the winner

Click a comment and it opens into a thread — a focused conversation with the AI about that one passage. Push back, add context ("I actually have the Q1 pilot numbers"), ask for options. Together you shape a proposed revision, and when you're happy you resolve it in a single click:

How to run a review

1. Open the Comments panel from the dock rail (or the command palette).
2. Pick a lens — Devil's advocate, Evidence check or Clarity & concision.
3. The AI reads your document and drops anchored comments: passages light up and bubbles appear in the margin.
4. Open any thread to discuss, draft a revision, and resolve it — replace, insert, keep as a note, or promote to a note.

The big idea Your document is the workspace

Most apps bolt a chatbot onto a sidebar. Markelangelo does the opposite: the AI works on the document in front of you, in place — and the prompts you run are reusable tools you own.

The tab-hopping tax

You know the drill. Write in your document, copy a paragraph, switch to a chatbot tab, paste it, type the prompt, wait, copy the answer, switch back, paste it, re-fix the formatting the paste destroyed — then do it again for the next paragraph. Your best prompts live in a chat history you'll never find again, and every round trip sends your work to someone else's servers.

Markelangelo collapses that loop. Your prompts are saved, named, versioned and one keystroke away. You run them on a selection or the whole document; the result streams in beside your text, you see a word-level diff, and you apply it in place — or edit it first. Nothing gets copied out. Nothing gets pasted back.

Three things you do to a document

How you reach it

• Select text → a floating toolbar appears: Improve, Shorten, Expand, Fix grammar, a Tone menu, Translate, Ask AI… and Run Prompt.
• Type / → the AI group in the slash menu (Run prompt, Summarise, Generate outline, Translate, Chat with notes).
• Run Prompt (Ctrl+Shift+J) → your whole library of saved tools, with variables and a live token/cost estimate.
• Right-click or the ✨ launcher → any prompt you've nicknamed, one click away.
• Chat with Notes (Ctrl+Shift+L) → ask questions across your whole indexed folder, with citations.

Use cases What you can actually do

These aren't hypotheticals. Every one below ships as a real prompt in your library — run it today, edit it, or fork it into your own. Real problems, real answers, all without leaving the page.

Draft from nothing

Business plan from a blank page. You know the pieces — market, model, financials, risks — but not where to start. Run Business plan and it scaffolds the whole structure into your document, with bullet prompts under every heading telling you exactly what to write. Then fill each section, using Challenge as you go to pressure-test your assumptions.

Any first draft. Draft takes a one-line brief — document type, topic, audience — and writes a structured first draft with clearly-marked [placeholders] where only you know the specifics. A blinking cursor becomes a working draft in ten seconds.

Interrogate what you've written

Reshape it for a new purpose

The board version. You wrote it for engineers; the board needs plain English. Select the passage, run Re-pitch with the audience set to "a non-technical executive", and it recasts tone, jargon and length — with a diff you approve before a word changes.

Meeting notes → decisions & owners. Messy notes in; a clean record out. Actions returns the decisions actually made and an Action · Owner · Due table — inventing nothing that isn't in the notes.

The thread running through every recipe: saved as a reusable tool · runs inside the document · applies in place · on your keys or a local model. No tab-hopping. No copy-paste. No lock-in.

Make it yours Build your own tools

The prompts we ship are a starting point. The real power is that every one is editable — and you can build your own library of document tools, tuned to exactly how you work.

Prompts that adapt

A prompt is a reusable instruction with slots. Drop in {{selection}}, {{document}} or {{title}} and Markelangelo fills them from what you're working on. Add your own variables — {{audience}}, {{criteria}}, {{language}} — and you're asked for them at run time, with sensible defaults.

Personas — reusable voices

A persona captures how a reply should sound — register, tone, structure — separately from what a prompt asks for. Write a "sceptical reviewer" or a "warm, plain-English" voice once, then attach it to any prompt or pick it at run time. Capture your voice and your AI edits stop sounding like a robot.

One instruction, everywhere

The switchable global message is a single instruction appended to every run — for example "return only the requested output, no preamble" — so you never have to repeat it. Any prompt can opt out.

Fast access

Put your most-used tools on the quick action bar — a drop-down toolbar of one-click buttons (your own icon and colour each) that run any prompt or command. Between that, nicknames on the right-click menu, the ✨ launcher and Run Prompt (Ctrl+Shift+J), your workshop is always a keystroke away.

AI Setting up AI

Bring your own key or run a model entirely on your machine — the AI layer works on your terms, never ours.

Markelangelo has no AI account and no hidden middleman. You connect a provider you already pay for, or you point it at a model running locally, and your keys stay encrypted on your own disk. Everything below lives in Settings ▸ AI, or in the consolidated Settings Shop.

Add a provider and key

Open the Models & Providers tab, add a provider — Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter — and paste in your API key. The key is stored encrypted on your machine using your operating system's secure storage; it is never sent anywhere except directly to that provider when you run a request.

1. Choose a provider and paste your API key.
2. Pick which models you want available from that provider.
3. Set a default model per feature — for example a fast, cheap model for quick edits and a more capable one for long-form drafting.

Or go fully local, no key at all

Prefer nothing to leave your machine? Point Markelangelo at a local model server — Ollama or LM Studio — and you get the full AI layer with no key, no account and no bill. Install one of those, pull a model, and select it as your provider. That's it.

Privacy & Sovereignty stances

One click picks how much your data travels. Each stance routes your cloud requests to match a promise, so you can dial in the right balance of privacy and capability for the work in front of you:

WRITING The editor

A live, distraction-free writing surface where markdown formats itself as you type.

Markelangelo's editor renders your formatting inline — headings, emphasis and lists take shape the moment you write them, so you see the finished look without a separate preview pane. It's plain markdown underneath the whole time.

Markdown shortcuts

Type the familiar markdown and it becomes formatting instantly:

The slash menu

Press / on an empty line to open the slash menu — a searchable list of every block you can insert, from tables and code blocks to callouts and AI actions.

Rich blocks

Every block is draggable — hover to the left of any paragraph, list or heading to reveal a handle, then drag it to reorder your document. Beyond the basics, the editor handles the demanding stuff too:

WRITING Callouts

Draw the eye to what matters with tidy, colour-coded boxes that travel with your file.

Callouts are highlighted panels for notes, tips, warnings and the like — perfect for guidance, caveats and anything a reader shouldn't skim past. Markelangelo gives you five flavours: Note, Tip, Important, Warning and Caution, each with its own colour and icon.

Two ways to make one

1. Press /, choose Callout, then pick the type you want — Note, Tip, Important, Warning or Caution.
2. Or simply type > [!WARNING] on its own line, press Enter, and write the body on the following lines.

Both routes produce the same result, so use whichever feels quicker in the flow of writing.

WRITING Collapsible headings

Fold long documents down to their outline so you can focus on the section in front of you.

Every heading in Markelangelo can be folded. Hover over a heading and a small chevron appears beside it; click the chevron to collapse everything beneath that heading, right up to the next heading of the same or a higher level. Click it again to expand the section back out.

It's a fast way to navigate a big document — collapse the parts you're done with, keep the section you're working on open, and the whole structure stays readable at a glance.

Great for long documents

The longer the document, the more this earns its keep. Working through a lengthy report or a sprawling set of notes becomes far less daunting when you can quietly tuck away everything except the part that needs you right now.

WRITING Images

Drop a picture in and it's saved right beside your document — everything stays on your disk.

Adding images is as direct as it should be. You can:

1. Paste an image straight from your clipboard with Ctrl+V — handy for screenshots and copied graphics.
2. Drag an image file from your file manager and drop it into the editor where you want it.

Either way, Markelangelo saves the image into an assets/ folder sitting next to your document and inserts a reference to it at the cursor. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is hosted elsewhere — the picture lives locally, right alongside the words it belongs to.

ORGANISE Outline & Properties

See your document's shape at a glance and edit its frontmatter as friendly, typed fields — no YAML wrangling required.

Two panels in the right dock help you keep a long document in order: the Outline shows its structure, and Properties gives you a tidy form for the metadata at the top of the file.

Outline

The Outline panel builds a live tree from your headings, nested exactly as they are in the document. It updates as you type, so it always reflects the current shape of your work. Click any heading to jump straight to it — handy for a report or a piece of documentation that runs to dozens of sections.

As you write, the section you're editing is highlighted in the tree, so you always know where you are in a long piece. Think of it as a table of contents you can navigate with, rather than just read.

Properties

Many markdown documents carry a block of frontmatter at the very top — a small slab of YAML holding the title, tags, a status and whatever else you like. The Properties panel turns that block into a friendly form: each entry becomes a typed field you can edit directly, without touching the raw syntax.

Properties come in the shapes you'd expect:

You can add a new property or remove one you no longer need, all from the panel. Everything you change is written back as ordinary YAML at the top of the file — nothing proprietary, nothing hidden. Open the same document in any other editor and the frontmatter reads exactly as you'd expect.

ORGANISE Wiki-links & Backlinks

Connect your notes into a living web of knowledge — link any document to any other with a pair of brackets, and see every connection flow both ways.

Wiki-links are the heart of turning a folder of markdown files into a knowledge base. Instead of hunting for the right file every time you want to reference it, you simply write its name in double brackets — [[note]] — and Markelangelo weaves the connection for you. It's the fastest way we know to manage all your project documentation as one interlinked, navigable whole.

Writing a link

Type [[ anywhere in your document and an autocomplete list of every note in your workspace appears. Keep typing to filter it, then choose the note you want:

• Use the arrow keys to move through the list;
• press Enter to accept the highlighted note;
• or simply click the one you want.

Once a link is in place, click it to open that note. If the note doesn't exist yet, clicking the link creates it for you on the spot — so you can link forward to a document you haven't written, then fill it in later. Your ideas lead; the files follow.

Precise links

Two small flourishes make links do exactly what you mean:

In the editor, the brackets tuck themselves away so your prose reads cleanly — but they stay in the underlying file. That means your links are portable: open the same folder in Obsidian, or any other tool that speaks wiki-links, and everything still resolves.

Backlinks — the web, both ways

A link only tells half the story: it points outward. The Backlinks panel in the right dock tells you the other half — every note in your workspace that links to the document you're currently reading. Follow those threads and the whole shape of your project reveals itself: which ideas reference this one, where a topic is discussed, how it all hangs together. It's the difference between a pile of files and a genuine, navigable web of project documentation.

Try it

1. Open a workspace folder so Markelangelo can see all your notes.
2. In a document, type [[ and start typing the name of another note.
3. Pick the note from the autocomplete list to insert the link.
4. Click the link to open (or create) that note.
5. Open the Backlinks panel to see every note that links back to it.

ORGANISE The Dock & Panels

Every tool you need lives one click away down the right edge — open a panel when you want it, tuck it away when you don't.

The right-hand dock is where Markelangelo keeps its working tools. Each is a self-contained panel you can open or close independently, so your writing surface stays as clear or as busy as you like.

What's in the dock

The dock rail

Running down the very right edge of the window is the dock rail: a slim, persistent strip with one icon for each panel. Click an icon to open its panel; click it again to close it. Because the rail never goes away, a closed panel is always exactly one click from reappearing — no menus to dig through, no state to remember.

This keeps the dock out of your way when you're writing and instantly available when you're not. Open just the Outline while drafting; add Backlinks when you're linking notes together; bring up the AI panel when you want a hand — then close them all and enjoy a clean canvas.

APPEARANCE Themes & Reading Comfort

Shape the app around your eyes and your mood — pick a theme, tune the typography, and strip everything back when you just want to write.

Markelangelo is a place you'll spend hours, so it's built to feel right for you. From the overall theme down to the width of a line of prose, the reading experience is yours to set.

Themes

Three hand-tuned themes set the tone of the whole app:

Typography Studio

The Typography Studio puts the finer details of your prose in your hands. Choose the prose font, set the size, adjust the line height for comfortable spacing, and dial in the reading width so lines never run too long to follow. Small changes here make a real difference over a long writing session.

Focus & Zen modes

When you want the world to fall away, two modes clear the decks:

• Focus mode dims everything except the paragraph you're working on, so your attention stays on the sentence in front of you.
• Zen mode (F9) hides all the chrome — panels, toolbars, everything — leaving only your words on the page. Press F9 again to bring it all back.

Document zoom

Need the text a little larger or smaller for the moment? Zoom the document in with Ctrl+= and out with Ctrl+-. It's a quick, per-document adjustment — handy for presenting on a big screen or squeezing more onto a small one.

NAVIGATE Command Palette & Quick Actions

Reach any command, jump to any file, and fire your favourite prompts — all without leaving the keyboard.

Markelangelo is built to be driven fast. Whether you know exactly what you want or you're hunting for it by name, there's a keystroke that gets you there in a second.

The command palette

Press Ctrl+Shift+P to open the command palette: a searchable list of every command in the app. Start typing what you want to do — toggle a panel, switch a theme, run an export, enter Zen mode — and the list narrows as you go. Choose a result and it runs. It's the single fastest way to reach any corner of Markelangelo, and it means you never have to memorise a keyboard shortcut you use only now and then.

Go to file

When you know the document you want, press Ctrl+P for Go to file. Type a few characters of a file's name and a fuzzy search finds it across your workspace — no need to remember which folder it's in or type the name in full. Hit Enter to open it. In a big documentation set, this is how you move between notes in the blink of an eye.

The quick action bar

The quick action bar is a drop-down toolbar of your own one-click buttons. Each button carries its own icon and colour, and runs whatever you assign to it — any prompt from your library or any command in the app. Build up a row of the actions you reach for most, and your day-to-day workflow becomes a single click.

MANAGE Settings, history & export

One tidy place to configure everything, a safety net under every save, and clean documents to hand out.

The Settings Shop

The Settings Shop gathers everything that used to be scattered into a single, non-modal workspace you can keep open while you work. Open it from File ▸ Settings Shop or with Ctrl+Shift+,, then move between tabs for your prompts, quick actions, models, per-feature defaults, privacy stance, personas and usage.

History

Markelangelo keeps local snapshots of each file so you can always step back. A snapshot is taken on save, before an AI change is applied, and whenever you ask for one by hand. Open the history for a file to diff any snapshot against the current version and restore it in a click — all stored locally, nothing sent anywhere.

Export

When a document is ready to share, choose File ▸ Export to produce a styled HTML or PDF. Exports carry proper syntax highlighting for code blocks and come with a light or dark theme, so what you hand over looks finished — while your source stays plain markdown on disk.

REFERENCE Keyboard shortcuts

The handful of keys that get you around Markelangelo without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

COVENANT Your work, your machine

Markelangelo is built on a simple promise: your files are yours, and nothing leaves your machine unless you ask.

This isn't a setting you switch on — it's how the app is made. The editor, and all local or bring-your-own-key work, stays account-free, telemetry-free and sovereign. There is no sign-up, no login, no phone-home, no analytics quietly watching what you type.

The covenant

Why it matters

If you live in your documentation — the writers, researchers, engineers and note-keepers who spend their days inside their words — this is the difference between a tool you rent and a tool you own. Your ideas, drafts and half-formed thoughts are some of the most personal things you make. They deserve a home that treats them as yours alone.