You searched for how to open a .md file and every answer told you to install Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a fine program. It is also a development environment with a terminal, a debugger, an extension marketplace and a folder-shaped mental model, recommended to you because you wanted to read two pages of text.
You do not need it. Here is what you actually have.
Reading
Quick Look — press Space in Finder
The shortest path there is. Select the file, press Space, read, press Space again. macOS has no Markdown renderer built in, so this needs a preview extension installed once; after that every .md file on the machine previews rendered, with no app open and nothing to configure. Details in Markdown Quick Look on macOS.
Good for: everything you only need to read once. Which is most of it.
A Markdown viewer
A small app whose job is to open a .md file and show it as a document: headings, tables, checkboxes, diagrams, an outline to navigate by, find, and printing. Set it as the default (Get Info → Open with → Change All…) and double-clicking behaves the way double-clicking a PDF does.
Good for: long documents, and anything you keep open while it changes.
TextEdit
Already installed, opens the file instantly, and shows you the source — hashes, asterisks and all. Useful for a quick look at a short file; unpleasant for a spec with tables.
The trap: TextEdit defaults to rich text. If it opens in rich-text mode and you save, you can turn a plain Markdown file into something other tools no longer parse. Use Format → Make Plain Text (⇧⌘T) before editing anything.
An online Markdown previewer
Paste and it renders. No install, works anywhere.
The trap: you have just put the contents of the file on someone else's server. Fine for a recipe. Not fine for a specification, a client document, or anything from work — and AI-generated plans tend to be exactly the internal documents you would not paste into a random website.
Google Docs, Word, Pages
Google Docs will import a Markdown file and convert it into a real document, which is a reasonable one-way trip if the destination was going to be a Doc anyway. Word and Pages are built around their own formats and do not read Markdown as Markdown — at best you get the source as plain text. None of the three is a Markdown editor: save from them and you have a .docx or a .pages, not your original file, which matters if a coding agent is still using it.
Editing
Markdown is plain text, so nearly anything can edit it. The question is whether you can see what you are doing.
- A viewer with an edit mode. Read by default, switch to editing when you need to, with the rendered version beside it or a keystroke away. The closest thing to "it behaves like a document".
- Notes apps — Obsidian, Bear, iA Writer. Genuinely good Markdown editors. The cost is that they want your documents organised their way — a vault, a library, an import step — which is a lot of structure to adopt for a file that landed in your Downloads folder this morning.
- TextEdit in plain-text mode. Works for changing a sentence. You will be editing punctuation by hand and hoping the table still lines up.
And you do not have to learn the syntax to make small edits. Fixing a typo, deleting a paragraph, ticking a checkbox: none of that requires knowing why the line starts with ##. Leave the punctuation alone and change the words between it.
When VS Code is the right answer
If you are already in the project, editing code alongside the document, ⇧⌘V opens a preview pane and that is perfectly good. The case against it is not the app — it is installing a development environment to read a document, and then still looking at source by default.
Sending it on
However you read it, the file usually has somewhere else to be. Print to PDF (⌘P → Save as PDF) for anyone outside the team, or copy the rendered document as rich text and paste it into Notion, Google Docs or an email — headings and tables intact, no asterisks.
nicemd
nicemd is the viewer-shaped answer: double-click a .md file and read it, press Space in Finder for the same rendered page, switch to editing only when you mean to. No project to open, no vault, no import. Reading, Quick Look, Save as PDF and Copy as HTML are free; edit mode, split view and export to HTML and Word are a one-time unlock.