Coffee

Maps in Markdown notes on the Mac, from a link

By Pedro Thomaz, who makes Coffee. 2 min read. Read as Markdown

Checked November 2026 on macOS 26.

A trip plan, a list of restaurants, the address of Saturday's meeting: some notes are about places, and a place reads better as a map than as a link.

Coffee draws maps in your notes. You write a small block, and the note shows the place.

Writing a map block

A map is a code block whose language is map. Its first line says where:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6916,-9.2160,16z

The first line can be:

  • A map link from Google Maps, Apple Maps, OpenStreetMap or Bing, copied from the browser's address bar. Short links, such as maps.app.goo.gl ones, don't say where the place is, so open them first and copy the full address.
  • Coordinates, written 38.6916, -9.2160.
  • An address or a place's name, such as Belém Tower, Lisbon. Coffee looks it up with Apple Maps.

Two more lines are optional. height: 320 sets how tall the map is, from 120 to 800 points, and zoom: 15 how close it is, from 1 for the whole world to 20 for a street.

What you see

In the page view the block becomes a picture of the map, centred on the place, with a pin and the place's name in the corner. It follows light and dark mode.

Click the map and it comes alive: drag it, pinch on the trackpad to zoom, or use the + and − buttons. A button brings you back to the place. Once you edit the note, it goes back to being a picture.

In the Markdown view you see the block as you wrote it. The note keeps only those few lines of text, so any other Markdown editor opens it as an ordinary code block, and nothing is lost.

On iPhone and iPad

Coffee for iPhone and iPad draws the same blocks. On iPad a tap makes the map live, as on the Mac.

What it doesn't do

  • No offline maps. Coffee asks Apple Maps for the picture, so it needs a connection the first time, and Apple sees the place you asked for. Without a connection the block says it couldn't find the place and tries again later.
  • One place per block. Several pins, routes and shapes aren't drawn. For a list of places, use one block each.
  • No key, no account. Maps come from Apple's MapKit on your Mac, so there's nothing to sign up for.

If a link doesn't work, paste the place's address instead, or its coordinates: in Google Maps, right-click the place and click the numbers at the top of the menu to copy them.