Introducing the Bardo Markdown Engine: Real-Time, Lightweight, and Open Source

Published: December 20, 2025

We are proud to announce another contribution to the open-source community: the official release of the Bardo Markdown Engine. This is the lightweight, powerful parsing engine that drives the seamless, real-time "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) editing experience in Bardo Notes.

Built entirely in Kotlin for modern Android development, our engine is designed to provide developers with a simple and performant way to parse and render Markdown on-the-fly within Jetpack Compose applications. Its key feature is its ability to handle real-time rendering, hiding markers to create a clean, live preview as the type types.

The Bardo Markdown Engine supports standard syntax, including headers, lists, bold, italic, code blocks, and strikethrough, as well as custom rich text tags like `{{y}}text{{/y}}` for highlighting. We've focused on making integration effortless: developers can get started by simply copying the `MarkdownEngine.kt` file into their project.

The engine is released under the permissive MIT License, granting developers complete freedom to use, modify, and distribute it in their own personal and commercial projects. We believe in sharing tools that empower other creators, and we hope this engine helps fellow Android developers build beautiful and intuitive text-editing experiences.

We invite you to explore the repository, learn from the implementation, and contribute to its future development.