Windows Central Insider
A new Markdown reader is now available through the Microsoft Store. Sefer is designed for reading documents, books, and notes. Since it's a Markdown reader, it's a versatile app. Markdown is a flexible text format you've likely seen in your everyday life without thinking about it.
Sefer is a specialized app that delivers on its promise to be a "quiet Markdown reader for Windows." It renders Markdown files well, lays them out in a way that's easy to read, and has some nice design elements that are worth admiring from an app development standpoint.
Sefer is now live on the Microsoft Store!A focused, premium Markdown reader for Windows, built like a real book.Real typography. Paper & ink themes. Zero distractions. Just the page.Download: https://t.co/yZv5q9eSJD pic.twitter.com/kIjV2zhidTMay 19, 2026
Sefer comes preloaded with some books: The Odyssey, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Common Sense. I admire the collection — Little Women is one of my wife's favorite books — but they don't showcase any fancy formatting in the text body.
Instead, they showcase the layout of the app. Sefer has wide margins to simulate the spacing of a printed book, though it also scales when it is resized. It shows a table of contents along the side of the app, making it easy to jump to a specific part of a book or document.
Sefer will return to a specific page when you reopen a book. It can also rerender a page if you edit the source file and save changes.
Rather than syncing to the cloud or the web, Sefer loads local .md, .markdown, and .mdown files.
A unique WinUI app
I spoke with Josh, the developer of Sefer, about the app. If you just care about having a good document reader, you can skip this part, but I love learning about what goes into making Windows apps.
The Markdown rendering within Sefer is custom, though it's built on Markdig. That allows Josh to choose how different elements are rendered.
Generally, WinUI apps rely on RichTextBlock or WebView. RichTextBlock struggles with certain types of content, such as code blocks. WebView uses a Markdown to html reader, which does not align with the native nature of Sefer.
While Sefer is a WinUI app, it has some design elements that make it stand out from something just built with templates. Little touches like the transition from light mode to dark mode feel fluid and add some flair to the app.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is an open text format that's used all over the web. Any README.md file relies on Markdown, making the format ubiquitous on GitHub and other coding platforms.
Many of your favorite messages apps support the format to some extent, such as WhatsApp allowing you to bold text by surrounding a word or phrase with asterisks. True champions of Reddit can create gorgeous posts stacked with information that's laid out beautifully because of Markdown.
I used to write all of my articles in Markdown. Our old content management system supported it, and I found it quicker to learn Markdown formatting than use the shortcuts built into that old system.
Markdown is also used in offline documents, such as essays, books, and journals. As a Markdown reader, Sefer is designed to make an optimal reading experience for those types of files.
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