I use geditfor most of my text editing, but markdown support is very limited.
Things I’ve tried:
- vscode, too heavy and intrusive
- Google docs, only renders, doesn’t show the plain text, need to manually export to see markdown
- Eclipse, haven’t actually tried markdown, but I have no doubt that it’s supported, but heavier than anything else
- atom, no longer developed last time I checked
- online editor, don’t want to share my text and functionality is poor
- type markdown, save it and render with pandoc, lots of effort, but the results are good
Over to you.
Since you mentioned VSCode. I wanted to bring up VSCodium. It’s a fork of VSCode with no telemetry. Yes, it’s a full fledged IDE, and probably too much if you just want to markdown editor, but I use it for much more than that, and I think it’s great.
You said you can type in markdown, convert it to PDF with pandoc and you like the results.
Now all you need is an editor that can open two file side by side (anything works here, I use emacs), and needs to auto reload PDF on file change. And a tool that can run your configured command each time markdown file changes (I have my own program for this, but it’s a simple bash script as well if you want to write).
Now with those two all you do is write in markdown and every time you save it the command will run, get the pdf and it’ll reload the pdf. Even if you don’t have the same program to open text and PDF you can just use two with split screen.
My all-time personal favorite is probably MarkText. I’m actually surprised no one else has mentioned it; knowing it has garnered almost 50k stars on GitHub.
I really like it for its realtime preview and support for mathematical expressions. Though, it’s wonderfully feature-rich; so please check out its README for the full list.
Unfortunately, it (currently) doesn’t enjoy as much development as it previouslu did. Which has ultimately led me to pivot to ghostwriter more recently.
There is also Zed Rust based code editor that ofc supports markdown
Codium with a markdown plugin gives both edit and preview with syntax highlighting. Add in Genie extension with a chatgpt api key and you can really do some cool stuff
Emacs’s Markdown mode has two options for preview:
-
C-c C-c p(Control-C Control-C p) runsmarkdown-preview, which will open a preview in a new window -
C-c C-c lrunsmarkdown-live-preview mode, which will show an updated-as you edit preview next to the text.
In addition to built-in functionality, in my emacs setup, I also personally bind
C-c a kto run Make. In myinit.el:(global-set-key (kbd "C-c a k") 'compile)That way, if you have any sort of project – which could hypothetically be a Markdown file – and a Makefile for it in the same directory, it’ll build it. An example Makefile:
all: foo.pdf %.pdf: %.md pandoc -f markdown -t pdf $< -o $@Editing
foo.mdin emacs and hittingC-c a kwill regenerate the pdf usingpandocwith that setup. It sounds like you’re familiar withpandoc.If you have
evincerunning on foo.pdf, it’ll monitor changes to the displayed pdf file, and then just update its display if the file changes.-
I like Apostrophe
I use pulsar edit, the successor to atom. Also on the terminal, have a look at glow.
Had a quick look for glow but couldn’t find it. I didn’t know about pulsar. Is it more stable than atom, which managed to fall over when ever I looked at it sideways, a bit like the ZX80 keyboard which would cause a reboot if you dared to think about touching it, that said, reboot was much faster than atom starting up. Does pulsar take the same absurd amount of time?
works for me.I have no idea what that’s a screenshot of.
What do other headings, tables and footnotes look like?
If it’s just more colours, that doesn’t help me.
First, lol
Second, that looks like Kate. It’s the stock text editor on KDE.
Name of the app is kate. It only does light formating and syntax highlight. Are you looking specifically for markdown editor that just doesn’t hide markup? From the list you gave my understanding was that you are looking for higlight and that’s ± it. There are multiple markdown specific editors that do it like ghostwriter, retext, or even emacs with markdown-mode (iirc it does rendering without hiding markup, auto-formats tables, makes links clickable, etc.)
I tried editing my post to add this, but Pachli doesn’t want to play at the moment.
Ideally I’d be able to use it to either see the raw markdown or the rendered version of whatever I’m writing, code in a dozen languages, articles, websites, legal documents, books, all of which I do pretty regularly.
The side-by-side view doesn’t do it for me, I’d more likely than not have multiple windows open with different documents instead.
It should do autocomplete, syntax highlighting, bracket closing, live spell checking in a variety of languages, launch quickly, be rock solid when faced with a massive log file and allow me to add menu-items to run bash scripts that do things like calculate the time it would take me to read out the text at my normal podcast reading voice or covert weird characters into hrml-entities.
The side-by-side view doesn’t do it for me, I’d more likely than not have multiple windows open with different documents instead.
That’ll probably rule out text editors like emacs tf you don’t want side-by-side. Emacs has some functionality that can do some styling, but you probably won’t have a purely WYSIWYG mode for, say, tables. It looks like emacs has some way to translate org-mode tables to Markdown, but that’s probably not quite what you want.
It should do autocomplete, syntax highlighting, bracket closing, live spell checking in a variety of languages, launch quickly, be rock solid when faced with a massive log file and allow me to add menu-items to run bash scripts that do things like calculate the time it would take me to read out the text at my normal podcast reading voice or covert weird characters into hrml-entities.
That’ll rule out most “small” programs targeting specifically Markdown.
Depends on what you mean by “massive” log files. If you mean you require out-of-memory editing – the ability to load only a small portion of the document into memory, which is probably going to be necessary once you exceed your machine’s main memory – then you’re looking at a small set of software. Some hex editors, emacs can use
vlf(which will constrain other features available), a few programs targeting specifically this feature.I haven’t looked at heavyweight word processors, but some may have reasonable support for at least many of those, stuff like LibreOffice. They probably won’t open quickly, but there are a few programs capable of speeding up startup by leaving a daemon running, just opening something in that daemon, like
emacs,urxvt, etc. You can possibly do that or just leave a blank document open on another workspace.Unless you are planning to go with emacs route, you have a chance to make it yourself from scratch.
Yeah, I hear you. There are a few other projects in the pipeline.
There are a few good ones I can recommend, depending on what experience are you looking for (programmer, writer, simple note-taking).
Apostrophe would be the first, better for freestyle writing IMO; and then in no particular order I’d recommend Formiko which seems to work wonders for technical / programming-related writing, Remarkable and Ghostwriter for that no items, text only, final desktop kind of experience. Most or all of these should be findable in software stores like Flatpak, too.
Obsidian, it’s not open-source, but it’s not locking you down, and it’s exceptionnally well written.
Take a look at Obsidian over at obsidian.md
If u wanna avoid the intrusiveness of vscode u can use codium for a fully foss experience
Now with AI, hard pass.
It doesn’t have any ai unless u add an ai extension. I use continue pointed at openwebui that uses a self hosted model full foss ai tool chain. And again its optional.
