Long documents are where Marked spends most of its life — drafts, research notes, book chapters that refuse to stay short. Reading Mode is built for that: keep your place, move a block at a time, mark what matters, and bring those marks with you when you share a TextBundle.
Choose Preview → Reading Mode, or press ⌃+⌥+R. If Speed Read is running, Marked stops it first.
The current reading unit — paragraph, heading, list item, image, code block, table, and so on — gets a quiet left marker. You’re not fighting a wash of highlight over the whole page; you’re just tracking where you are.
While Reading Mode is active:
j / ↓ — next reading unitk / ↑ — previous reading unith — highlight the selection, or toggle a highlight on the current unit when nothing is selectedNavigation eases between blocks and keeps the current unit near the upper third of the preview. Scroll with the trackpad or mouse and Marked retargets focus without yanking the page.
Marked also stores a reading position per document. If you come back later and the saved place differs from what’s on screen, you get a choice: Resume jumps to the saved unit, or Start from Here takes whatever is already visible.
Need fewer distractions? Hit Focus mode on the Reading Mode tool rail. Everything except the current unit dims, and the dimming follows you as you move with j/k. Turn it off from the rail, or leave Reading Mode and it clears on its own.
Highlights are first-class document state, not throwaway decorations.
Select text and press h for an inline highlight. With no selection, h highlights the whole current unit; press it again to clear that unit highlight. The first time you highlight, Marked asks for a signature (used for CriticMarkup attribution). You can change it later in Preview settings.
There’s also a selection popup with a highlighter button, plus a sticky auto-highlight tool on the rail if you want every selection to become a highlight. Point at an inline highlight and you get start/end handles to grow or shrink the range. Changes save automatically and restore when you reopen the file.
Control-click a highlight to Share… it through the system Share sheet, delete it, or work with comments. Prefer highlights to stay visible after you leave Reading Mode? There’s a preference for that: Show highlights when Reading Mode is off.
A signature says who; a comment says what you thought.
Add or edit a note from the selection popup’s comment icon, or Control-click a highlight and choose Add Comment… / Edit Comment…. Delete the comment without deleting the highlight if you only want the mark.
Highlights with notes show a small indicator. Open Preview → Show Comments and those notes show up in the Comments sidebar with a connector to the parent highlight, alongside CriticMarkup and other document comments.
Preview → Export Highlights… (or the Export tool on the rail) writes Markdown, HTML (using your current preview style), plain text, CSV (Readwise-friendly — comments in Note, signatures in Signature), or JSON.
JSON is Marked’s interchange format. Import with Preview → Import Highlights… and merges happen by stable id: new ids add, matching ids update, your other highlights stay put.
Separately, if you want CriticMarkup in the source:
Print and PDF include Reading Mode highlights by default. Flip Include Reading Mode highlights on the print sheet for one job, or set the default under Export settings.
This is the part I’m happiest about for collaboration.
On Save TextBundle, enable Include Highlights to embed highlights.json in the bundle (or TextPack). Open that bundle in Marked and the highlights merge in. While a TextBundle is open, Marked also autosaves highlight and comment changes back to highlights.json — without rewriting text.md.
So the prose stays the prose, and the reading layer rides along in the bundle.
Reading Mode ignores footnotes when choosing the next unit, walks paragraphs inside collapsed headline sections instead of leaping to the end, and saves position/highlights reliably even if you close the window quickly. Local Markdown links in the preview open the right file immediately again. PDF export got a round of pagination fixes (blank pages from table keep-together, mid-table gaps, heading overlap, clipped table rows).
Besides Reading Mode, recent builds also shipped:
// comments preference that converts line comments to CriticMarkup<!--TOC-->, after-marker heading rules, print/PDF duplicates)mk CLI accepts multiple file paths in one invocationFull detail lives in the in-app changelog. Reading Mode is the headline — the rest is the quiet scaffolding around it.
Learn more about Reading Mode in the docs, and check out Marked 3 and see what you’re missing.
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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