Reading & review¶

⌘R renders the Markdown into a typeset reading view. It's not a static preview: a caret moves through the rendered text with vim motions, and the whole review workflow — comments and suggested changes — lives here. ⌘R again returns to the source, caret kept in place.

Leave a file while reading and it remembers: reopening it resumes the reading view at the very spot you left, so a long review survives any number of sessions.

Navigating¶

h j k l, w / b / e, 0 / $ — move the caret through the prose.
gg / G — document start / end; ⌃d / ⌃u, ⌃f / ⌃b, Space — half-page and full-page scrolling.
gh — headings overview: an outline jump-list of the document, opened on the section you're in. j/k move the selection and preview it live — the view follows; Enter stays at the previewed spot, a digit jumps directly, Esc returns you exactly where you were.
/ — search with a live fuzzy hit list (same as the write view); n / N step through the hits.
Enter with the caret on a link follows it, routed by target: a .md file opens in place (so a folder of linked notes reads like a small wiki, and other.md#section lands on that heading), web and mail open in your default browser, #heading jumps within the document, and anything else (.html, images, PDFs…) opens with the system handler. A .grafli link says it's not supported yet; a link to a missing file whispers not found rather than creating one. Links are set in the zen link blue so they read as links without shouting; clicking works too.
gb or Backspace — back to the document you followed the last link from, exactly where you left it.
gl — links overview: the same jump-list popup as gh, listing every link with where it points; j/k preview, Enter follows the selection.
go — open another file without leaving the reading view (see Opening files).

The whisper status¶

The faint line in the card's corner tracks the read: the section you're in, how far through the document you are, roughly how many reading minutes remain, and what still awaits review (§ Architecture · 42% · ~7 min left · 3 changes · 2 comments). The section breadcrumb follows the caret — so a long document always tells you where you are without opening the headings overview — and is absent before the first heading. When the caret is on a link the breadcrumb turns into → where ++enter++ goes (a filename, host, or #slug), so you see the destination before committing. The review counts disappear as you resolve them: an empty whisper is a finished review.

Typography¶

Headings breathe asymmetrically — more space above (closing the previous section) than below (starting their own) — and h1/h2 carry a thin rule, GitHub-style, so section breaks are visible from across the room. Inline code wears a soft chip wash so identifiers pop while scanning, and blockquotes get hint-gray ink with a thin bar at the left — a different voice for somebody else's words.

Tables get the paper palette too: a bold header row in the code-band shade, thin warm gridlines, and cell padding for air — real table formatting, so it prints with the rest of the page.

The caret is a soft blue block over the current glyph — vim-style, easy to find on the warm page when you're placing a comment, without pulling the eye the way a hard cursor would.

⌘. turns on section focus: everything outside the section under the caret rests behind a translucent paper wash and follows the caret as you move — the rendered twin of the write view's paragraph focus.

f turns on focus reading mode — a deeper, immersive read. The caret line holds at the centre of the view and the page scrolls under it (typewriter-style; at the very start or end of the document the caret travels to the top/bottom instead), while a spotlight centred on the reading line fades the text away by distance. Because the fade keys off the caret's position rather than paragraph edges, brightness slides smoothly as you scroll — a heading or a short line never makes it jump. It persists across sessions and supersedes ⌘. while it's on (only one focus at a time). Comments, marks and search stay live beneath the wash.

Code blocks¶

Fenced code sits on a full-width band in a deeper paper shade, so the code part of a document is visible at a glance. A language tag on the fence (```python) adds calm syntax highlighting drawn from the zen palette — keywords in the title blue, strings in the warm red, comments in gray italic, numbers and constants in amber; everything else stays body ink. No tag means no colors: the band alone marks the block.

Printing (⌘P) from the reading view prints the typeset page, not the raw source, and carries the code band onto paper. Images referenced by a relative path (![](diagram.png)) render against the document's own folder, so they show wherever you launched textli from.

Comments¶

Select a span with v + motions, then:

c — comment the selection (or, with the caret on an existing commented span, reveal and edit that comment).
]c / [c — step to the next / previous comment.
Enter — reveal-edit the active comment; ⇧D deletes it.

Commented spans get a soft highlighter wash in the rendered text, so review feedback is visible without shouting. The comment editor opens as a small note tinted like the mark it leaves, in a handwriting face and dark red ink; it grows as you write — wrapping to width, scrolling once it's tall enough — so leaving a remark feels like annotating the margin rather than filling in a form.

Suggestions (track changes)¶

s — suggest a change: with a selection, propose replacement text (leave it empty to propose deletion); without one, propose an insertion at the caret.
]s / [s — step to the next / previous suggestion.
a / x — accept / reject the suggestion under the caret and advance to the next open one.
⇧A / ⇧X — accept / reject all suggestions at once.
gc — changes overview: a jump-list of every suggestion and comment, with the same live preview as gh (j/k follow, Enter keeps, Esc restores).
p — clean preview: read the prose as if every suggestion were accepted; the source stays untouched until you actually accept.

Removed text is struck through, added text is set in a calm red — accepting or rejecting animates the change into (or out of) the document, and every resolution is undoable in the source.

The format: CriticMarkup¶

Everything above is plain text in your file, using CriticMarkup:

{==span==}{>>a comment on it<<}
{++added text++}
{--removed text--}
{~~old~>new~~}

Because the marks live inline, review round-trips need nothing but the Markdown file itself: hand it to a colleague, an AI agent, or a git branch, and the annotations arrive with it.