TCB, M.D.

A fast, native Windows Markdown viewer & editor. Taking Care of Business.

TCB, M.D. is a lightweight desktop Markdown app for Windows 11, built on Tauri 2 and Rust with a native WebView front end — no bundled browser engine. It opens .md files instantly, renders them cleanly, lets you edit and save in place, and can typeset a polished PDF.

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Features

• Open & preview Markdown — clean CommonMark rendering, instant on launch.
• Edit in place — toggle edit mode (Ctrl+E), save with Ctrl+S.
• Math — inline and display math via KaTeX.
• Flavor-aware — pick a target Markdown flavor; Save warns if your document uses features the chosen flavor doesn't support.
• Print View (Ctrl+Shift+P) — paginated preview with optional serif typography (Crimson Pro, justified text, drop caps); print with Ctrl+P.
• Typeset PDF export — high-quality PDF via pandoc + typst (when both are on your PATH).

Why it's fast

Native by design — there's no Electron/Chromium payload; the UI runs in the system WebView and the core is Rust. The release build is tuned for quick cold start: size-optimized (opt-level = "s"), link-time optimization, a single codegen unit, and a stripped binary.

Benchmarked startup/footprint numbers will be published here once measured on a release build — this README won't quote figures that haven't been measured.

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Toggle edit mode	Ctrl+E
Save	Ctrl+S
Print View	Ctrl+Shift+P
Print	Ctrl+P

Status

Early MVP. Windows 11 desktop (Tauri 2). The focus right now is a rock-solid Markdown view/edit experience.

Running

Zero setup on Windows 11. TCB, M.D. is a single native executable. It uses the WebView2 runtime that already ships with Windows 11 — no bundled browser engine, no installer, nothing to configure. Get the .exe and run it.

(The optional Typeset PDF export feature shells out to pandoc and typst when they're on your PATH; everything else works with nothing installed.)

Building from source

Only needed if you're working on TCB itself — end users don't build anything.

First-time Windows setup

A nicer terminal (optional but recommended):

winget install Microsoft.WindowsTerminal

A package manager makes installing dev tools painless. winget is built into Windows 11; you may also want one of:

# Chocolatey
winget install Chocolatey.Chocolatey
# Scoop (per-user, no admin)
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://get.scoop.sh | Invoke-Expression

UniGetUI is a friendly GUI that drives winget / Scoop / Chocolatey from one window if you prefer not to use the CLI.

Install the Rust toolchain (provides cargo). On Windows you also need the MSVC C++ build tools (the linker Rust uses) — rustup will prompt to install them if they're missing, or install them explicitly:

winget install Rustlang.Rustup
winget install Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.BuildTools   # then add the "Desktop development with C++" workload

Recommended: mise to manage toolchains/versions — installable straight from cargo (or via winget):

cargo install mise          # recommended
# or:
winget install jdx.mise

Build

git clone https://github.com/gnomatix/tcb
cd tcb
mise trust          # trust this repo's mise.toml (one time)
mise install        # installs the pinned Rust toolchain + Tauri CLI
mise run build      # builds the app — one command

mise run build runs cargo tauri build with the pinned toolchain and produces:

• src-tauri/target/release/tcb.exe — the standalone app binary, and
• src-tauri/target/release/bundle/ — the NSIS setup.exe and the .msi installer.

For live development (debug build, auto-reload) use mise run dev. Without mise, the equivalent is cargo tauri build (or cargo build --release in src-tauri/ for just the bare tcb.exe).