Unmarked# Troubleshooting
Why a file won't open
Last updated
Unmarked reads text. It declines a file that isn't text, or one over 25 MB. That's a deliberate call. Unmarked saves your edits to the file on its own, and it would rather not open a file than risk writing garbage back over your work.
A .md file is plain text under the hood. So is .txt, .markdown, and the rest. When one won't open, it's almost always one of these.
It's a binary file, not text
A file with a Markdown-looking name can still be binary inside. A PDF saved as notes.md, an image, a Word .docx, a database file. Unmarked checks the contents, not just the extension, and stops when the bytes aren't text.
Open it in the app that made it instead. If you want a Markdown copy, export from that app, or paste the text into a new Unmarked document.
It's over 25 MB
Unmarked caps files at 25 MB. A plain Markdown file almost never gets that big on its own. When one does, it's usually a log dump, exported data, or a document with large content pasted in. The cap keeps the app responsive and keeps autosave safe on files that size.
If you have a genuine text file above the limit, break it into smaller files, or tell us what you're working with and we'll take a look.
Accented letters look wrong
The file opened, but some characters didn't come out right. Unmarked reads UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, Windows-1252 and Latin-1, and saves a file back in the encoding it came in, so a file from Windows Notepad round-trips unchanged. A file in another encoding can open with odd characters. Re-save it as UTF-8 in the app that created it, then open it again.
When Unmarked declines a file, nothing is lost. It hasn't touched it. Declining means there's no half-opened state and no autosave to undo. Your file is exactly as it was.
A .md file opens in a different app instead
This one isn't Unmarked declining the file. If your .md file opens in TextEdit, Xcode, or some other editor on a double-click, that's the macOS default-app setting, not Unmarked. Fix it once in Finder. See Make Unmarked your default Markdown app.