I moved from a previous setup to Obsidian[0], but if you end up thinking Obsidian is overkill, here's my old setup:

Visual Studio Code, with 1 plugin, Markdown Paste[1]. VSCode has a text editing experience very close to the simplicity of notepad++, including tabs. Markdown Paste to paste image from clipboard into Markdown -- location/filepath of locally-saved image can be changed.

In VSC, you can open a preview tab which will show the rendered Markdown (including images) and put that side-by-side with your text editor tab.

[0]: https://obsidian.md/

[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=telesoho...