A cross-platform Markdown editor focused on speed and usability | Hacker News Reader

A cross-platform Markdown editor focused on speed and usability

marktext.app

53 pointsfeross55 comments

Nowadays when I hear "crossplatform" I think bloated electron app. That's sad.

I’m in the same boat but, tbf, as a developer, what are the alternatives ?

Multiplatform GUI toolkits are abandoned or still heavily tied to C++ or Java

It is still very new but Flutter desktop support looks promising. I've been toying with it in my free time and it is very easy to get up and running.

Is there something wrong with running a local web server and opening the app in a browser tab? Not my area of expertise, so maybe it would have its own set of issues.

The issue for Electron is making sure the right version of Node and Chromium are available which is why each app is so big: each apps includes the version of both that they were last dev&tested against. That is why running several eats a fair amount of RAM - they have full Chromiums running, not sharing anything between them even if they are the exact version.

> Is there something wrong with running a local web server and opening the app in a browser tab?

For the average user, probably. Though for a developer targetted app probably not IMO.

For a dev, running a new enough version of Node (but, for not well maintained apps, perhaps having one that is not _too_ new around) and making sure you have a recent enough browser, is not an issue, but for beginners or completely non-technical users that is a barrier to using the app.

As access to local resources from within the browser is getting practical, I think the best common ground will have to be two versions from (mostly) the same source: a pure JS version that someone who can follow the instructions can run using already installed node and the same browser instance they use for everything else, and a memory hungry Electron version for others to install just by downloading the huge installer. And of that first version can be run as a service, or perhaps there would be a third version with extra parts not needed for either local version for that, for those who don't want to install at all.

Maybe at some point OSes/distributions/appstores will go with “we have this LTS version of Node and this LTS version of Chromium, otherwise provide your own”. That way devs could release a full cross-platform version of their app (Electron with all the baggage), and streamlined versions (no Node, no Chromium, just the app and any extra supporting libs) for Win10, Win11, Debian11, Ubuntu20.04, ..., that have been tested against the versions included with those OS options. Appstores would always get the streamlined versions because they can make sure the right version goes to each OS version they service. Perhaps there would be a combined installer: still huge as it contains everything, but it only installs and runs the app+libs if the target's standard backend & browser are found to be compatible.

You wouldn't need to use Node if you're running it locally. It could be in any language, and in my experience, Node is in the tail for being bad about requiring specific versions. If you write it in Go, for instance, you don't have those problems.

Gtk isn't tied to C++ or Java in any way. While Qt and wxWidgets are written in C++, they aren't heavily tied to C++ either. For all these toolkits, bindings for many languages exist.

I love Gtk and Qt but they are a pain to watch on Windows and OSX (although Qt is manageable under Windows)

The saddest thing is that you're right — it is a bloated Electron app, almost 300 MiB uncompressed.

Compare that to the < 6 MiB for LightPaper, the app that I use on macOS.

Not to mention the security holes from the thousands (millions?) of Node modules an app like this probably contains.

Thank you for referring to lightpaper. It really fit my need and this was my first time to hear about that app.

That isn't really comparing like for like though is it, given LightPaper is _only_ available for the Mac, is a paid app (inexpensive, yes, but not free, and the site says nothing obvious about future update policies), and not open source.

If I want to make chips, fries, wedges and jackets, the fact that a cucumber has far fewer calories and goes really well in a tuna sandwich is, while true, hardly relevant!

In this case, the bloatware is macOS itself with 50GB Xcode.

Lightpaper looks like a fantastic markdown editor! But the landing page makes me feel like it isn't getting much love from the developers. The copyright notice at the bottom, for instance, says 2019.

Any idea whether it is still getting updates?

It's not Electon's fault that all other solutions are not cross-platform.

>all other solutions are not cross-platform.

What makes you think this?

Has Dart + Flutter taken off yet? Or does some other competitor pop into your mind?

I could write it in Python, or Java, or C#, and it would run everywhere that those environments run.

If your "app" is running in java, python, you need to bundle the correct runtime version. (As well as another UI framework, and all dependencies)

You're back in bloaty electron land then, no?

>Has Dart + Flutter taken off yet? Or does some other competitor pop into your mind?

We definitely need a better crossplatform GUI framework to replace electron. Any promising one?

Tauri looks interesting

ghostwriter is a cross platform markdown editor I use that's written in c++.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be actively being worked on and isn't complete enough for me to use personally (custom themes aren't implemented, for example).

These are the WYSIWYG Markdown editors that I am aware of:

- Typora (great but somewhat buggy).

- Obsidian is working on a WYSIWYG mode.

- Nota (nota.md) is promising but very beta.

- Zettlr

- Bear is working on a WYSIWYG mode.

That was pretty much my evaluation of Mark Text, as well:

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/05/trying-mark-text-for...

Does Notion not count?

I never considered Notion to be a Markdown editor. Is there an easy way to open, edit and save Markdown files with Notion?

They have a Markdown-like syntax, but AFAIK it's only for notes stored in their cloud service.

https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim works for me.

I wish I could consolidate a lot of the apps I use for Markdown:

Blog: I used Vim for a long time, now I use the online editor https://stackedit.io. I found that composing blog posts involves cutting and pasting big blocks of text a lot more than coding, which is better done with a mouse. Stackedit has a side-by-side view and WYSIWYG.

Github wiki: Good for sketching ideas for blog posts, and documentation. Editable by others. (wish list: I kinda want the Roam Research bidirectional link thing, I often have that problem)

Github issues: similar to a TODO list for many people.

Zulip: Good for chatting with others, and for brainstorming ideas. So it overlaps with the Github wiki for that. Not good for a TODO list.

So there are all these apps that use Markdown but they are a bit disconnected.

Is that what Notion is supposed to be? A bunch of apps that interoperate and are unified? I haven't tried it since I mainly stick to open source stuff (with the exception of Github, though it is built on git)

Joplin has its quirks but overall is a great, mature WYSIWYG markdown editor with syncing/backups and an Android app.

I know it's quite heavy but for performance, consistency, and attractive rendering (surprisingly important) having tried many options, including my personal runner-up Byword which hasn't been mentioned, I settled on the usual suspect of VS Code. Usually with the Github Markdown extension switched on due to liking their theme, but obviously that isn't a requirement.

Open a Markdown file and use your platform's Markdown Preview hotkey (eg Cmd+K,V). Simple.

There is a plugin for Obsidian that helps with WYSIWYG!

Also isn't Bear WYSIWYG?

I saw "Typora 1.0" yesterday in the HN firehose, but it didn't make it to the main page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29349690

I've been playing around with it this morning, and ended up spending $14 on the license. Used it to go through some of my README.md files that I had some mistakes on. https://typora.io/

Edit: A commenter below says this is no longer free

Since we're here: I highly recommend Typora for macOS. Truly minimal and well-done macOS-native Markdown editor. Previews final output inline as you edit without separate markdown/preview panes. Beta is free. (Not my project)

https://typora.io

[edit: actually finish the comment]

It's no longer free. It's also an electron app.

It looks webview-based, but otherwise it's a native app.

No, Typora is an Electron application, occupying more than 200MBs on disk (and similar amount of RAM upon start with no documents opened). See this announcement for example: https://support.typora.io/What%27s-New-0.9.66/

Maybe you're both right. That announcement implies it is only Electron on Windows/Linux.

I just tried it.

Slow, unresponsive, probably Electron based or something similar.

When the app is so unresponsive, no matter how nice it looks or how polished the UX is, it is ruined from the first 10 seconds of using it.

Visual Studio Code is a fantastic cross-platform Markdown editor, especially with a few extensions: markdownlint, Spell Right, Word Count, Markdown All in One, and docs-markdown.

Isn't the point of Markdown that it is supposed to be regular text, formalising conventions that have been used for traditional ASCII text files for decades?

Sure, but the point is also to render said ASCII into something a bit more slick and dynamic. These editors let you work with the underlying markup, while showing you the final product. In fact, this is the way I wished all word processors worked—the worst thing about MS Word in my opinion is the invisible hand of the phantom formatting characters.

> ...the worst thing about MS Word in my opinion is the invisible hand of the phantom formatting characters.

WordPerfect says "Reveal Codes!" from the grave...

Formatting is being nonsensical? Jump into Reveal Codes, delete all the weird formatting stuff by tag, and solve your problem.

> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.

The point of Markdown is to write plaintext in Markdown and convert to Markup (as in Hypertext Markup Language)

Source: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Leaving aside the well-known and commented "features" of Electron, out of interest, I looked into the most prominent Markdown file in the repository, README.md. Huh? Where is the markdown? Scroll, baby, scroll… This is disturbing for a Markdown editor and does not leave a good impression, again, feels like more emphasis is put on appearance than substance. Which brings us back to my entry sentence, Electron and its reputation...

> "features" of Electron

Thank You for TL;DR:

So, nothing new, but just another one Electron-based editor XD

Personally Obsidian has my heart. Not only does it support HTML and CSS snippets but the community behind it is insane. They're lovely people and the shit they do with Obsidian is absolutely incredible. The plugins are absolutely amazing as well. They basically make Obsidian what it is.

I don't mean to derail the thread, it's just that when I see "Markdown" I think "hhhhh obsidian my beloved"

What I'd love to see is an extension for VSCode that can do wysiwym/wysiwyg Markdown editing while keeping the same keyboard shortcuts of VSC.

There is a "Typora" knockoff extension for vsc that does some of what I want, but it has its own keyboard shortcuts, so multiline editing, etc. don't work.

you can split your window and open a Markdown Preview for your current file on the other side of the split, what else do you want beyond that?

> wysiwym/wysiwyg Markdown editing

I use a folder of markdown files as my Note taking system. For that I don't want a split screen setup.

For those who are in the PortableApps ecosystem, I maintain a build of Marktext here:

https://github.com/jgonyea/Mark-Text-Portable

In one sense this is cross platform and in another it isn’t.

Many of the features are for extensions. Extensions that are not widely adopted where you might put the markdown

“Focused on speed” and written in Electron.

Sigh.

It might be great if it weren't extremely buggy.

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