
Mark Text: Simple and Elegant Markdown Editor Focused on Speed and Usability - severine
https://marktext.app/
======
svat
The important feature worth mentioning (more than “simple and elegant” and
“focused on speed and usability”) is that it directly renders the Markdown (in
the editor itself, not in a separate pane or window), giving a WYSIWYG feel
while still being backed by a plain-text (markdown) format that if needed can
be edited directly (even in an different editor). This I've found to help
enormously with being distraction-free (while still having the peace of mind
from not creating an irrecoverable binary blob). Of course, to someone else it
may not be a big deal.

Before seeing this just now, Typora
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977))
was the only Markdown editor I had encountered that does this, but it is not
open-source. Another was the halfway-in-between (shows both syntax and
rendering) Abricotine
([https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine](https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine))
which has the sense to mention it as the main feature: “Markdown editor with
inline preview” and “you can preview your document directly in the text editor
rather than in a side pane”.

Are there any other editors like this?

~~~
antjanus
One thing I really wish some of these editors had were an IDE-like sidebar.

Whenever I'm editing markdown files, it's usually in a folder of notes, or
blog posts, or writing of some kind. And it'd be nice to be able to cycle
through several open files like you would in VS Code.

I tried writing my own but -- I just didn't have time and got bored of it.

Have you heard of editors that are specific for markdown and have this
feature?

~~~
chrizel
You should check out Mark Text (which is the main topic of this thread) - Mark
Text can open folders and it looks very similar to VSCode. In the settings you
can even say "open this folder by default, if I open Mark Text"... this looks
like it would make quiet a nice and easy note taking solution.

------
windsurfer
I decided to give it a try, and it's almost a 100MB to download. Due to being
unsigned, Mac OSX blocked running this web app. Why isn't there a demo online
that I can try in my web browser? Isn't this supposed to be a simple electron
app?

Anyways, I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's
settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock.

The text rendering is awful. It's blurry and smudged on my non-retina display
due to not using subpixel smoothing. Here's a screenshot comparing Atom (top)
to Mark Text (bottom): [https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4](https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4)

Highlighting and pasting text is totally unpredictable. Try pasting in 10 *
characters and you'll see that it's almost impossible. How are you supposed to
do this? Sometimes it replaces * with \\*, sometimes not. And sometimes it
replaces it with - ??

I tried to copy paste a few paragraphs of text a few times, and once it turned
into this strange highlighted text that when I started a new paragraph,
deleted all of my newlines. What's going on?

This editor does not seem ready yet.

~~~
oauea
If you're unhappy about your OS preventing you from running applications that
you want to run, you might want to consider switching to another OS.

~~~
stephenr
Similarly if you’re unhappy that a developer hasn’t signed their releases so
you can be sure it hasn’t been tampered with, you might want to consider
switching to another app.

------
stanski
Can anything running on Electron be classified as simple? Just saying. (yes, I
am _that_ guy in this case)

I like the idea behind it though.

~~~
mumblemumble
I think that this argument is, frankly, over. Electron is _the_ way to build
cross-platform apps that don't merit separate UI code for each platform.

Electron wins because Electron apps are able to deliver consistently decent
UX, something that never happened with Swing or GTK+ or WxWidgets or whatever.

Sure, it eats RAM. It turns out that I care about that so much less than I
thought I would. I'm rarely using 100% of my system's RAM these days, so I'm
willing to burn a couple hundred MB on widgets continuing to be sensibly drawn
and laid out when I resize the window.

~~~
swebs
>Sure, it eats RAM. It turns out that I care about that so much less than I
thought I would.

It sure is nice having a powerful developer machine with 16 or 32 gb of RAM.
Just remember there are a lot of people out there running on 4gb laptops or
even less. These days, the OS, web browser, and Slack alone are already enough
to max it out and start swapping.

~~~
jonfw
An 8 gig stick of ram costs about thirty dollars. It doesn't make sense to run
4 these days.

~~~
DJHenk
> An 8 gig stick of ram costs about thirty dollars. It doesn't make sense to
> run 4 these days.

It does not make sense if 4 Gb mean that you can only run a browser and
Notepad.

If, however, you are a bit older and you remember the time that you had the
choice between 4 MB and 8 MB and people were still able to do all their
computer stuff, including internet, in a graphical environment, then you
thoughts are more in the line of: what the fuck are these lazy and incompetent
programmers doing these days? And this is coming from someone who earns a
living as a developer.

~~~
jonfw
There were a lot of hours spent and features unimplemented those days in want
of RAM. Now we don't have to do that- we can do more, and we can do stuff way
faster as developers.

If you spend a half hour over the entire life of your machine even considering
RAM, you might as well double it for $30.

Using RAM is good. It's fast, it's cheap, and anybody with 8 gigs has it in
abundance

~~~
loudandskittish
May I ask what unimplemented features you're referring to? I think one of the
biggest issues the older crowd has with Electron apps is not only that they
eat up 500MBs of RAM, but also that they only have a tiny subset of the
features contained in apps that ran fine with 500KBs.

~~~
redwall_hp
"Hello World" in Electron is 100MB. That's the bare minimum. It's quite
insane.

------
0x1d4e
I’m currently using Vnote
[https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/](https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/) after
trying Typora and other Markdown editors. What I like about Vnote is it is
based on Qt and has most of the functions from Typora plus Vim mode, a lot of
keyboard shortcuts, good search capacity across different notebooks (which
basically folders and sub folders containing markdown files), and some
extensions like MathJax, Flowchart, Mermaid. Vnote (and Typora) supports
defining folders for images or attachments (relative or absolute path). Even
though it does not have a kind of webcliper extension for browser like Joplin,
you can copy the content of a webpage and paste it directly into Vnote (also
Typora), it can reformat the content as markdown and copy the associated
images to the defined folder. I used Joplin before and still like it a lot but
recently switched to Vnote and version-control the notes with git. For that, I
can "sync" the content of my notebooks using git across different devices (for
iOS, I use Working Copy as a git client and it can render the markdown notes
with images). Vnote needs to store the structure of your notebook and other
metadata such as tags in JSON files. You do need to have those JSON files
otherwise Vnote will not display the tree of your notebooks. But basically you
can use other editors to open Vnote notebooks because they are just folders
and markdown files.

~~~
gexla
This looks promising! Downloading now. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
wpietri
I'm really interested by the sponsorship bits at the bottom; they're using
both Open Collective and Patreon. It seems to me that one of the problems with
going beyond the scratch-a-personal-itch level is how unsustainable it can be.
I'd love to see that normalized, so that people who create a lot of value for
others aren't economically penalized for choosing open source.

------
jocs
I am very happy to see the discussion about Mark Text on Hacker News. I am the
author and main maintainer of Mark Text. I will seriously think about the
suggestions for Mark Text which you comment here. I also welcome everyone to
submit the issue and suggestion to Mark Text on GitHub
[https://github.com/marktext/marktext](https://github.com/marktext/marktext).
Thank you everyone.

~~~
lytefm
I appreciate Mark Text a lot, have been switching from Typora at the beginning
of the year. I'm taking all my notes with it and find features like KaTeX and
Mermaid very useful. Some remarks and questions from my side:

\- How is the current status the Plugin system? It would be cool to try
integrating features like Pandoc Citer from VSCode or LaTeX autocompletion,
but I guess that would be too much for the core.

\- Since you're already using pandoc, more available export formats or the
option to define own exports via settings would be useful!

\- Images are linked to their current path when added. I liked Typora's
feature of automatically copying them into an asset folder a lot.

Overall, great work! I might learn Vue an Electron just for the sake of
MarkText. Don't listen to the Electron critics - having a reusable rendering
engine and the same features as in GitLab available locally is way better than
saving some RAM.

------
stephenr
This website is completely unusable on mobile. It’s worse than a pre-
smartphone site because it disabled zoom out so the content is just cut off.

------
awill
I get that Electron is accepted as a way to do multi-OS apps. However,
whenever possible, I find there are better OS specific apps. As I use Linux
and Mac, I find the best app for each.

For example, on my work mac I use Ulysses, and sync to a cloud folder. Then on
Linux, I use caret or typora with the same synced folder. Caret/typora aren't
as nice as Ulysses (IMO), but as they all support markdown, all three are
fully compatible. I'd rather not use an inferior app only because it's cross
platform. Since the content is transferable between apps, and is synced
outside the app, this seems like a pretty good compromise.

If I could buy a high quality markdown editor on Linux that rivaled Ulysses I
would.

~~~
Sendotsh
Isn’t Typora electron too? Or is their Linux version a native app?

~~~
awill
It is. But I spend more time at work using a Mac. I would rather use the best
app for the OS. On Linux, there isn't anything as good as Ulysses.

------
jitl
This website look pretty broken in my mobile browser.

~~~
burlesona
Came here to say the same thing. Sorry to be “that guy” but it’s really hard
for me to have any positive thoughts of a front-end web project when it’s
website doesn’t work on mobile.

~~~
alias_neo
Came here to say the same, glad I'm not the only one.

The website is unusable on mobile so I can't even check out if the app is any
good. I guess I know enough already.

~~~
curiousgal
You couldn't just tick the "Request desktop site" box available in every
browser? But yeah I guess you know enough already, the dev should apologize
because the website of their free product is not mobile friendly.

~~~
alias_neo
I'm also a developer, and if you're not mobile-first let alone mobile
friendly, you're doing it wrong in 2019. Why do I want to pan and scroll
around a tiny site rendered in desktop mode on my mobile for your brand new
product?

It's either lazy or ignorant and neither gives me confidence in their
software.

~~~
curiousgal
It's a _free_ product.

------
hoistbypetard
I'm surprised by how much I like this idea. (I have not tried it yet.)

Right now, I use vim for almost all of my text editing. I pop into JetBrains
IDEs when their analysis tools or debugger integration are helpful to me. And
I use VSCode for most markdown editing. This, if it's good, could replace
VSCode for me with a tool that's much better for the purpose I need. So
there's basically no new trade-off for me... I've already caved on the
electron front for markdown editing anyway. This could just make the payoff
for that trade much higher.

~~~
keithnz
I tend to use VSCode for markdown as it gives a preview, though I also use Vim
for it as well. I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in
Markdown these days. Including my own notes.

I tried this Markdown editor. But very quickly decided I didn't like it, I
felt handicapped not seeing the markdown and losing Vim bindings. But partly
it's because I don't actually really need the visualization of markdown. I'm
happy looking at the raw syntax of highlighted markdown. In Vscode I'll open
the preview just to check I haven't done something silly. Also, the rendering
of markdown in VsCode seems nicer ( perhaps more familiar )

~~~
hoistbypetard
> I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in Markdown these
> days. Including my own notes.

Same here. And the preview, particularly of inline images, is what I like
about VSCode for it.

The main thing I like about this editor after trying it out for a little while
today is the table stuff. For some reason that doesn't work as well for me in
raw syntax as the rest.

I think my ideal markdown editor would basically be the VSCode plugin's auto-
suggestion of bullet syntax, the ability to paste images inline and have them
land in a specified directory with a predictable path, and a good table
editor.

This one does a good job with the tables IMO. I haven't tried it much with
images because that didn't really come up today.

------
cryo
12.3K stars on Github; over 1.300 commits; 197K downloads. 0 supporters on
Patreon

That's the sad reality for open source devs.

~~~
dingus
The tiers are $50/$100/$500 a month with a goal of $5000 per month to spend
_half of his free time_ on development.

For a markdown editor? I see most Patreons with tiers around $3/$5/$20, and
those are actually complex/ambitious.

~~~
epicide
Yeah, those are definitely some weird tiers.

The beauty of these services is that I can toss a couple bucks a month to
projects that I use. I don't want my name in credits, I don't want a dinner
with the author, I don't want sneak preview access to whatever. I just want an
easy way to support something that brings me value.

Not even my _total_ monthly contributions hit $50.

------
geoelectric
I keep a pseudo-bullet journal in markdown. Unfortunately, I rely on two
things this (and a lot of other) Markdown editors won't do:

First, "-", "+" and "*" are all legal bullet characters for creating unordered
lists.

This allows you to put further semantic meaning into your plaintext (for me
that's notes, new tasks, events respectively) though it does get lost in
render. This editor loses that distinction.

Second, and this one drives me nuts with MD editors not supporting it,
"+<TAB>text" is just as legal as "+<SPACE>text" for Markdown--the spec, such
that it exists, is just whitespace after the bullet.

I personally use that to create a bujo-style gutter column between the <UL>
bullets and the text where I can insert a space and a resolution symbol
without disturbing plaintext alignment.

So, "+<TAB>New Task" eventually becomes "+<SPACE>^<TAB>New Task" to indicate
it's been tracked, for a final render of "o ^ New Task"

nvAlt is one of the few that does this right, and will actually copy the
"+<TAB>" to the next line as a leader instead of only copying "+<SPACE>" or
not treating the "+" as a bullet at all if a tab follows.

This editor won't even let you input a tab character. Tab always indents,
whether it's opt-Tab, ctrl-Tab, or what.

I think Markdown is great, but the value I've seen is more in the semi-
formatted plaintext representation than just being a text-based way to
WYSIWYG. If I want WYSIWYG there are significantly more direct ways to get
that. I wish more of the MD editors concentrated on optimizing the plaintext
experience, as nvAlt is getting a bit long in the tooth.

------
ryanianian
The inline MathJax editor with live-preview is nice, as is proper markdown
parsing (you can put code-blocks inside lists! _gives side-eye to Bear.app_ ).
And it's got a pleasing stylesheet. But I don't really see what this brings to
the table to be honest.

It's electron so it doesn't feel native, and it takes over a second to open a
nearly-empty document. OS-level key-bindings (Ctrl+A/E etc on Mac) are
overridden or broken in weird ways, and some usual typing conventions don't
work (double-enter to break out of a code-block). You can't click to move the
cursor in a number of situations. The "type @ to insert something" seems weird
- markdown by its nature is easy to type. The editor kinda supports tabs but I
couldn't figure out how to switch them without the mouse.

All this said, my biggest gripe is that I can't change the font to a monospace
font. Yes I'm writing prose, but I want to write in a monospace font. Always.
I understand this is a personal preference, and the author lets you change the
font but only to a small handful of pre-determined fonts - there is no option
to use a custom font. That is just..weird.

This thing shows some promise if it can be made faster and made to support a
more ergonomic writing environment. As it is it's just kinda a neat demo with
some cool features but an overall unfinished UX.

------
RMPR
What I need from a markdown editor is the preview and vim keybindings that's
why my editor of choice is vscode + vim keybindings + markdown all in one
extension. Beside this combo all you can have is either vim keybindings
without preview or preview without vim keybindings so if somehow marktext
(which is great because open source) can have both it will be my editor of
choice without any doubt.

~~~
infinitezest
Came here to say this, particularly RE: vim key binds. If those were added,
I'd be much more interested. Even without the binds, though, I think it feels
pretty good to use.

------
jmfayard
This looks really nice...

... except like every other apps around there it only supports Markdown

Feature request:

Please add an option to convert the resulting file to a better format like
Asciidoc and other better markup formats

Maybe using pandoc.

WHY?

I feel unwell with Markdown

Markdown deserve credits for having found a real important problem to solve

on the other hand, it's not a good solution to that problem

... but just good enough that its bad aspects are not obvious

Combined with its current popularity, this makes progress very hard

But there are so much things that are wrong with Markdown.

Nested lists? I get them wrong every time.

Images syntax is bad.

Tables syntax is worse.

No table of contents.

You can't have variables.

You can't include another file.

In the end, every website does its own markdown because Markdown sucks.

Interopability? Ah ah. Some have tried. That's a rabbit hole to get into.

In the end, Markdown is just a starting point... To a real format like
Asciidoc.

~~~
alias_neo
What I need is something that let's me write my docs in markdown and then
quickly and easily render them to PDF with nice output, runs on Linux, and
doesn't render remotely.

I've used Grip, and I use the Markdown to PDF plugin in VSCodium but none of
these really meet the requirements.

~~~
jmfayard
Asciidoctor has no problem rendering files to PDF.

You can convert your source markdown files with
[https://github.com/asciidoctor/kramdown-
asciidoc](https://github.com/asciidoctor/kramdown-asciidoc)

~~~
alias_neo
Thanks I'll take a look.

------
RMPR
At least for installation on another distribution it doesn't suggest you to
install apt-get.

[http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/](http://support.typora.io/Typora-
on-Linux/)

------
yellowapple
It's almost perfect. The minor but irritating problem with it is that I can't
seem to use my own fonts in the editor; the selections for the editor and code
fonts are fixed. Worse, if I manually edit ~/.config/marktext/preferences.json
and change editorFontFamily and codeFontFamily to my preferred fonts, Mark
Text fails to launch at all, whining that they "should be equal to one of the
allowed values".

Like, what gives? Why restrict this? It obviously ain't an Electron
limitation, since plenty of other Electron apps support my fonts just fine.

~~~
jocs
This new version 0.16.0 will support more fonts, and will be released in the
middle of this month.

~~~
yellowapple
Does "more fonts" mean "any font installed on my system"? Or does it mean "a
bigger hardcoded list of fonts"? If the latter, will that list include
Computer Modern?

------
crispinb
This is really nice, but I find whenever I try one of these types of apps to
type or edit real text for more than a few minutes, I find myself wanting pote
(plain old text editor) features. The first thing I miss is generally line-
moving, but more accumulate to the point where I eventually move back to my
favoured pote of the moment.

------
tenkabuto
As a Typora user, I'm glad that this editor includes a table of contents area
in its sidebar. I had to dig into the docs to find that it does indeed have
this. ToC navigation helps me _so_ much for being/getting organized.

------
ausjke
seems better than typora though I miss the file-system-layout on the left side
when I have a lot of md files.

one thing I like to have for both is the vim key bindings, so I don't need use
up-down-left-right keypad to move cursors, for example if I type __bold the
editor will auto match __to be __bold __which is nice, but I still have to
move my keys to skip the two __just added, in fact many editors provides
autocomplete or bracket complete but they do not provide a way for me to skip
the stuff they added easily, or I must be missing something basic here.

------
camillomiller
The website is broken for me on mobile (iPhone 11 Pro Max).

------
rock_artist
I've tried looking the website on my iPhone SE with Firefox. Sadly the website
isn't responsive at least on my phone.

------
bobcostas55
I switch between this and Zettlr, they each have their small annoyances
depending on what you're doing.

~~~
Hoasi
Tried Zettlr, but couldn't get it to work.

------
computerex
Site looks like a disaster on mobile.

------
greggman2
which apps support full embedded HTML? I like markdown but I run into
exceptions where I need some html all the time. It could be a short span for
color or an iframe for an example and most libraries and apps seem to fail
there.

~~~
gexla
That wouldn't be Markdown though?

A better question might be, what flavor of Markdown serves your purposes? Find
this, and then look for an editor which supports it.

Adding anything non-standard would be creating a new flavor of Markdown. I
want for all the features I use in an editor to be fully portable. If it's not
standard, then it's not portable.

NOTE: In this case, by Standard, I mean widely used.

I get what you are saying though. You want the full versatility of HTML at
some point. My method of dealing with this is to come up with a set of scripts
which converts snippets and turns the doc into HTML. The Markdown file would
be the source and the HTML would be the view layer. The scripts are a build
process. Of course, this takes time which not everyone has. It's impossible to
cover the use cases for everyone though. And I find so often that when I get a
feature I think I can't live without, it still falls short because I didn't
think through my problem well enough.

Otherwise, it might be best just to use HTML from the start. Or you could
ditch Markdown and try Asciidoctor. The issue there is that you're limiting
your editor options.

[https://asciidoctor.org/](https://asciidoctor.org/)

~~~
greggman2
html has always been a part of markdown. It says right in the original spec

> Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is
> very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea
> is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my
> opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to
> make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format;
> Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only
> addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.

> For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML
> itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re
> switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.

and

> Span-level HTML tags — e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> — can be used anywhere
> in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.

[https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html)

The entire point is just to make _most_ of the document easy to read. Not to
replace nor forbid html.

~~~
gexla
You're right, I guess I just haven't used Markdown like this. My usage has
mostly been within plain text editors which have the limitations you're
talking about. I don't personally find the need for including HTML in my
Markdown documents, but I can understand this expectation since many have
known Markdown from (for example) WYSIWYG editors which do handle a mixture of
formatting types.

------
mihaela
Nooo, another Electron "app"

------
rehasu
What does it do better than the oldest simple and elegant markdown editor,
vim?

