Introducing Textual and future direction

[gonzalezreal]

Over time, MarkdownUI has grown far beyond what I initially imagined. Along the way, a recurring theme emerged in discussions, issues, and experiments: many of the hardest problems weren’t really about Markdown, but about rendering rich text in SwiftUI — layout, selection, attachments, performance, and extensibility. Some of these limits were increasingly hard to address incrementally within MarkdownUI’s existing architecture.

For that reason, I started a new project called Textual, a SwiftUI-native text rendering engine where Markdown is just one possible input format, rather than the core abstraction. Textual builds directly on the ideas, feedback, and lessons learned from MarkdownUI, but with an architecture better suited to address these broader concerns going forward.

What this means for MarkdownUI:

• The project is not being removed or archived.
• Existing releases remain available and supported.
• I’ll continue to accept fixes and maintenance improvements where appropriate.
• New features and larger architectural work will happen in Textual instead.

If you’re starting something new, or if you’ve run into limitations with MarkdownUI before, I’d love for you to take a look at Textual and share your feedback.