Documents

taiku turns any markdown or MDX file into a working document — a live-preview editor for runbooks, design notes, READMEs, and agent skill files, right next to the terminals that produced them.

Read and edit modes

Open a markdown or MDX document and you get a reading view with rendered formatting, links, and embeds. Switch to edit mode to change the source, and the preview re-renders as you type. Relative links resolve against the file's own location, so a runbook that points to a sibling note just works.

Markdown and MDX behave the same way in taiku — same read and edit surface, same features below. Documents are also fully collaborative: open one in a shared session and several people can edit it at once, with changes merging live. See Multiplayer editing for how co-authoring works.

Your scroll position and cursor follow the document as you switch between source and preview or step back to a note you opened earlier, so you land where you left off instead of at the top.

Diagrams and math

Fenced diagrams and inline math render directly in the preview and re-render as you edit.

Code fences tagged mermaid (or mmd) become diagrams:

graph TD
  A[Build] --> B[Test]
  B --> C[Deploy]

Math uses dollar signs — single dollars for inline math, double dollars for a block:

The Pythagorean identity is $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$.

$$
\int_0^\infty e^{-x^2}\,dx = \tfrac{\sqrt{\pi}}{2}
$$

When your cursor enters a math span the source becomes editable again, then re-renders the moment you move away.

Callouts, footnotes, and emoji

Blockquotes that start with a typed marker render as styled callouts, matching the conventions you may know from other note tools:

> [!NOTE] Optional title
> Body of the callout.

Supported types include note, info, tip, success, question, warning, failure, danger, bug, example, quote, todo, and abstract, along with common aliases. Add + or - after the type to start expanded or collapsed; the title line toggles it.

Footnotes use the standard reference-and-definition form. References render as superscript anchors, and the definitions gather into a footer with back-links:

This claim needs a citation.[^source]

[^source]: Author, *Title*, 2024.

Emoji shortcodes between colons, like :rocket: or :warning:, render as glyphs in preview while staying editable on the active line so you can fix a name without fighting the renderer.

Embeds and links

Embeds pull another file into the rendered document. Standard image syntax works as expected:

![Build chart](./charts/build.png)

Wiki-style embeds with a leading ! reach across your notes and adapt to the target's type — images render inline, PDFs render as a paged viewer, audio and video get player controls, and other text files render as a nested read-only preview:

![[diagram.png]]
![[spec.pdf]]
![[clip.mp4]]
![[shared-section.md]]

Without the leading !, [[note]] is a plain wikilink that navigates to the note instead of embedding it.

Frontmatter, tags, and aliases

A document can start with a --- YAML block. Common fields get lightweight controls, and you can always edit the raw YAML.

Tags work as inline hashtags like #incident or as frontmatter fields. Opening a tag shows a generated page listing everything that carries it, which you can navigate like any other document.

An aliases list (or a single alias) registers alternate titles for a note. If two files claim the same alias, taiku surfaces the conflict so you can resolve it.

Live JSX and TSX previews

Code fences marked jsx or tsx can show a live preview next to the source, so a document can include a working component instead of a screenshot. Previews run in an isolated sandbox; if one can't load, the fence source still renders normally. Advanced frontmatter fields let you configure the props and globals available to these previews.

Export to PDF

When a document is ready to share outside taiku, you can export a rendered PDF. The desktop app downloads the PDF directly; in the browser, taiku uses the print flow.

Next steps