While working recently on a markdown document in Visual Studio code I started searching for 3rd party apps to preview markdown text. I use the awesome bearapp for note taking and hoped that it offered real time mark down preview. Sadly it does not. They do however suggest using Marked2 for this purpose and this does work great but is a premium/paid option. If you are looking for a great free option and don’t need a deep feature set in your preview capabilities Visual Studio Code already offers a markdown preview…

Right click on your markdown file in the project and select Open Preview. To show real time edits you can setup a two column/split screen pane off of View > Editor Layout > Two Columns…

Two column window setup

Now as you make changes you can see those changes reflecting in realtime in the preview pane…

Real time markdown preview