Houston

I built a Markdown reader because every Markdown app tries to be an editor first.

I don't need another editor. I have six. What I need is something that opens a file and renders it well. Fast, clean, no sidebar of plugins I'll never use.

Houston does that. Drag a file in. Read it. Close it.

It runs on Tauri, which means it's a native app that starts in under 200ms and weighs about 4MB. Not an Electron wrapper pretending to be native. Not a web app in a frame. Actual native performance with actual native memory usage.

The reading experience is the product. GitHub-flavored Markdown, syntax highlighting, auto-linked headings, and typography tuned for comfortable line lengths. No themes to configure. No appearance settings. One look, done right.

Tabs let you keep multiple files open. Keyboard shortcuts handle navigation. You can drag and drop from Finder. That's the feature set.

People ask why there's no editing. Because editing is a different problem, and the tools that solve it already exist. VS Code is a better editor than anything I'd build. Houston is a better reader than anything VS Code renders.

The hardest part wasn't building it. It was not building more of it. Every week I'd think of something to add — a file tree, a search panel, export to PDF. Every week I'd ask whether it made the reading better. The answer was always no.

A 4MB app that opens instantly and does one thing. That's the whole pitch.

Software doesn't have to be ambitious to be good. Sometimes the best thing you can ship is the smallest thing that works.