The Daily Pattern
Most people who work with AI touch dozens of markdown files a day. Context files that shape how agents behave. Specs that define what to build. Documentation that records decisions. Plans, notes, drafts, logs. They’re scattered across repos and folders, and they matter more than ever.
ML-42 is designed for this pattern: open your projects, browse what’s there, read something, edit something, move on to the next thing. No ceremony, no import step, no database migration. Just folders and files.
Multi-Project Navigation
Add as many project folders as you work with — repos, docs directories, personal notes, client folders. The sidebar keeps one project expanded at a time (accordion-style), so you always know where you are without losing access to everything else.
The command palette (Cmd+K) searches across all projects simultaneously. When you’re trying to remember where you put that architecture decision record, you don’t need to know which project it’s in. Type a few words and ML-42 finds it — by filename or content.
Navigation history works across projects. Jump from a context file in one repo to a spec in another, then Cmd+[ back to where you started.
Folder Overviews
When you click a folder, ML-42 doesn’t just show a file list. You get a visual overview: document cards with excerpts and modification dates, subfolder counts, and breadcrumb navigation. It’s the difference between browsing a library and reading a directory listing.
This matters when you’re orienting yourself in a project you haven’t touched in a week. The folder overview tells you what’s here, what changed recently, and where to dive in — without opening individual files.
Live Preview Editing
The editor follows one principle: reading and writing should be the same surface.
When your cursor is away from a block, you see rendered markdown — clean headings, formatted text, clickable links, syntax-highlighted code. Move your cursor into any block and the raw markdown appears for editing. Move away and it re-renders.
This means you can read a long document naturally, then fix a typo or add a paragraph without switching modes. The formatting toolbar appears on text selection for people who prefer clicking to typing markdown syntax.
Tables and Code Blocks
Markdown tables render as clean, aligned grids with bold headers and subtle row separators. The rendering adapts to the available width and adjusts as you resize the window. Click into a table and you’re editing the raw pipe-delimited markdown.
Code blocks render with syntax highlighting for Swift, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, C/C++, HTML, CSS, JSON, YAML, Shell, SQL, and Ruby. The fences hide when you’re not editing them.
Both adapt to light and dark mode with appropriate color schemes.
File Watching
ML-42 polls for external changes on a short interval. This matters when you’re working alongside AI tools that write markdown output to disk. Run an agent that generates documentation, and the updated file appears in ML-42 without manual refresh.
This also means ML-42 plays well with other editors. Edit a file in VS Code, switch to ML-42, and you’re looking at the latest version.
Keyboard-First
Every primary action has a keyboard shortcut:
- Cmd+K — Command palette (search everything)
- Cmd+F — Find in document
- Cmd+N — New document
- Cmd+Shift+N — New folder
- Cmd+[ / Cmd+] — Back / forward
- Cmd+Option+I — Toggle inspector
- Cmd+B — Bold
- Cmd+I — Italic
- Cmd+K — Insert link (with text selected)
All shortcuts are visible in the menu bar.
Creating Files in Context
The New menu knows where you are. If you’re viewing a folder, new files are created there. If you’re viewing a file, new files go in its parent folder. The menu label tells you the target: “New Document in docs” or “New Folder in notes”. No dialog asking where to save — ML-42 already knows.
The Inspector Panel
The inspector serves different purposes depending on what you’re viewing:
Documents: A table of contents built from headings, plus an AI-generated summary (when available). Click any heading to scroll there with a smooth animation. The background carries a subtle tint of the document’s accent color.
Folders: Recent activity — files modified, created, or changed — sorted by recency. Useful for seeing what’s been happening in a project at a glance. The background tint shifts to the folder’s accent color.
Toggle it with Cmd+Option+I, or leave it open as a persistent navigation aid.