Marrow's icon: a purple heart with a text cursor through it

Marrow

A lovely native Mac app for typing out your favorite books and poetry, and learning your favorite passages by heart.

Walden Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Click the passage and type it yourself Slips show in warm gold. Carry on.

Marrow is a practice, not a typing trainer. Don’t worry about speed, or score. Just be present with the words on the page, and get them into your body.

Download the free trial Buy Marrow for $15

Type it yourself

The author’s words are on the page, faint. Each keypress inks in the next letter. A slip shows in warm gold. Carry on.

A page of The Great Gatsby in Marrow. The words typed so far are bright, a few slipped letters are gold, and the rest of the page is faint. A page of The Great Gatsby in Marrow. The words typed so far are dark, a few slipped letters are gold, and the rest of the page is faint.
The Great Gatsby, partly typed

Say it aloud

Mark a passage while typing and choose Learn by Heart. It waits for you in By Heart, a place of its own. There, a sitting teaches you one line at a time. Say the line aloud while it is inked. Say it again with the line gone. Then say it with the lines before it. Or choose Listen: your Mac follows your voice. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Blake's poem The Sick Rose in Marrow's By Heart. The first three lines are inked and the rest are faint. Under the poem it says: Say this aloud three times, slowly. Blake's poem The Sick Rose in Marrow's By Heart. The first three lines are inked and the rest are faint. Under the poem it says: Say this aloud three times, slowly.
Learn by Heart, one line at a time

Save to Readwise

Drag across a passage to mark it. ‘Save to Readwise’ will save it to your Readwise.

A page of Walden in Marrow with one sentence marked, and three choices under it: Save to Readwise, Learn by Heart and Copy. A page of Walden in Marrow with one sentence marked, and three choices under it: Save to Readwise, Learn by Heart and Copy.
Mark a passage, Save to Readwise

Add your own

Marrow ships with The Great Gatsby, Walden, Rilke’s Poems and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Add your own books from text files, Markdown files, EPUBs, PDFs, web pages or pasted text. Copy-protected ebooks won’t work. Bring in your highlights from Readwise or a Sublime collection and start typing the lines you’ve already saved.

Marrow's shelf: a plain list of four books. The Great Gatsby, Walden, Rilke's Poems, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Marrow's shelf: a plain list of four books. The Great Gatsby, Walden, Rilke's Poems, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
The shelf of books

Eight typefaces

Light mode is warm paper, with a subtle woven grain. Dark mode is for night owls.

A native Mac app

Marrow is a native app, written in Swift for the Mac. It’s not a web app in a wrapper. The download is less than 5 MB. Your shelf, your place, and your highlights will be synced to your other Macs through iCloud.

The name is from a passage in Walden: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

A free one-week trial. Then $15 once, for all your Macs.

Download the free trial Buy Marrow for $15

Runs on a Mac with macOS 14 or later