Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes | Hacker News Reader

Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes

mimoo.github.io

24 pointsbaby44 comments

Im touched that “Ghostty but for X” is a marketing point but what does it mean in this case? I thought this might be based on the architecture I did for Ghostty. But it’s not. Or it might be full native UI, but it’s not (it’s GPUI). Not trying to be rude or unappreciative but as the creator of Ghostty here… what do you mean?

Github[1] page says it's intended to "feel" like Ghostty:

> A native macOS note-taking app that feels like Ghostty — GPU-accelerated, keyboard-first, monospace, zero-config.

[1]: https://github.com/mimoo/ghostmd

I’m curious about the overlap between people that want a keyboard driven experience, but also would prefer a Mac-native GUI rather than a TUI or a vim / emacs distro. Seems like a very narrow audience to aim for.

same kind of keyboard shortcuts, feels the same

Welcome to the club. It’s like when people say “Bloomberg Terminal for X”. You just can’t really say anything because everyone knows it’s not Ghostty, based on it or will ever be it, but it’s about the vibe… and if you then chase after them, it only serves as free advertising :)

> Markdown is already beautiful. We don't render it. We don't preview it. You read it raw, the way it was meant to be.

I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.

Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.

Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.

I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.

Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.

I would agree with this. Markdown by definition is a markup language that’s designed to be easily read/written and also rendered.

There’s nothing wrong with showing markdown unrendered, but it’s odd to claim it was “meant to be” unrendered.

You’re reading too much into the AI generated prose. Just a little bit later they say about “why raw markdown”:

“Every note app eventually dies. When it does, your notes should survive. Plain .md files will outlive every app, every company, every format war.”

Which doesn’t make a lot of sense — it’s still a format being rendered, otherwise I may as well use notepad.

Agreed. I want my h1’s to be larger than my h2’s. That visual distinction is how I parse data faster. Flat markdown with no formatting feels like it’s missing the point of Markdown.

And are they really proposing that we ought to read italics and *bold* like this?

Edit: Oops. Looks like HN has formatted bold/italics for me. Italics should be bracketed with one asterisk and bold bracketed with two asterisks.

This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian, which is my go-to "notes app which is just a bunch of markdown files stored to your computer"? I very much like Obsidian, and as I understand it they are your direct competitor, so some indication of how you want to distinguish your app from theirs would be great if you want to compel me to switch. :)

> Every feature we didn't build is time you spend writing.

Also, I feel that this kind of marketing language rubs me the wrong way (perhaps also that it feels LLM-ish). How is you not adding features saving me time? Maybe it saves you time...

It says "no electron". I guess that's a differentiator.

But also it says: "Raw markdown. No preview pane. That's the point."

So I guess it's intentionally more primitive than notepad, if that's a thing you want?

Obsidian is not libre, at the very least. This repo purports the project to be MIT.

> This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian,

To be honest, other than both of them allowing you to write markdown, they're not comparable.

Obsidian is the current favorite of the "make a second brain" crowd which is based the concept of a Zettelkasten [1]. There are thousands of plugins to customize Obsidian to turn it into whatever you want. It just so happens to use Markdown files to store your notes. It's a very powerful tool, but it's overkill for most people who want to write a few notes in Markdown.

Ghost isn't about wiki links, plugins, hypertext, Zettelkasten stuff.

It's just for writing, which I think is fine. Not everyone wants or needs all of whiz bang features of Obsidian or Notion or Microsoft Word.

Regarding that previewing isn't included; it's not a big deal in reality.

The Notes app that comes with macOS can import markdown files and render them. There a hundreds of apps, utilities, plugins, websites that enable a user to render a markdown file. For most people, that wouldn't be ideal; I get it.

(Aside: at a user group meeting, I saw a developer coding something in Vim with no syntax highlighting. I had never seen that before. He said he liked it better that way. Not everyone likes the same things.)

There's a great app from indie developer Brett Terpstra called Marked [1] that was created to preview markdown files. It has tons of features, all centered around previewing markdown files. I've been a satisfied customer of Marked for years.

We all use certain apps for certain things even if we have other options; sometimes it's for aesthetic reasons or we just like how a particular app "feels" when we use it.

If people enjoy using Ghostmd, that's great.

[1]: https://marked2app.com

Obsidian doesn't "just happen" to use Markdown - the entire point of the app is that it writes to markdown. The URL is literally http://obsidian.md. The "notes save to your filesystem" is a concept directly lifted from Obsidian. Saying they're "not comparable" just doesn't make sense.

I wrote this because I can't stand obsidian, I want something opinionated with good defaults and that's not overly sensitive

As others, I find the comparison to ghostty somewhat confusing. Also, this seems like a separate app for what could be a TUI application? Unless I'm missing something.

The idea of showing raw Markdown with just a few colors and maybe some bold/italic variations is compelling, but what about tables? Tables in Markdown can be very useful, but also a pain to type out/format manually.

Auto-save on every keystroke sounds good, but wouldn't that hammer the underlying storage too much for no reason?

And the installation instructions continuing the unfortunate trend of `curl | bash` doesn't help..

-----

On the topic of Markdown editors, what are the current recommendations (primarily for Linux)? Obsidian is a crowd favorite, but it seems too heavy if I want to only open a single file, especially outside of any vault. Something to preview/edit `README.md` files would be nice.

Here's one: https://github.com/marktext/marktext

There are other suggestions at https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1023abr/what_is_the_...

I suspect GP was looking for non-electron apps since they said Obsidian is too heavy, so marktext won't cut it.

You guessing, based on an overgeneralization of "too heavy" (the context was quite explicitly opening a single file outside the Obsidian vault--nothing about electron), that it isn't what they're looking for provides no value to me (or to anyone else, for that matter). I was simply trying to be helpful; if marktext isn't what they want then they won't use it. The same for the other solutions I posted, such as using pandoc to generate html from markdown.

I found apostrophe to fit this requirement perfectly: https://apps.gnome.org/en/Apostrophe/

This is a mysterious use of "X but for Y".

> Diary entries get a path: diary/2026/march/03/

Date paths should use at least a double digit numerical index so they are naturally ordered when sorted lexicographically. Numbers also give you i18n for free (assuming Gregorian calendar of course, but it seems that's what this non configurable tool does here).

not a bad idea!

I don’t get it. Why not just use a terminal and a shell, like Ghostty?

And Glow.

Same. I can already view plain text in vim in ghostty. At the very least I'm not understanding what the value add is here.

???

Why not a TUI app ? I don't really want a second terminal that only does one thing...

I’m working on Ghostty for Recipes this weekend.

Next week I’m going to build Ghostty for vacation writing.

But I think what’s really going to be huge is Ghostty for text!

What's the point of markdown when it's not rendered? Markdown is for formatting things to look different, like headlines and code blocks look actually different, what's the point of typing the characters to format your text if you don't even see the formatting and it looks like plaintext

Bear is my fav answer to this. It's mostly "just markdown", but great design. Nice Apple cloud sync integration. Just the right touch of formatting ("# Header" renders bigger and hash is grey, but still markdown, tables are visually tables, images render inline, etc.

Similarly https://prose.sh which is a markdown blog you just rsync to their service

This seems overly complicated. Let the editors be editors.

I recently created a Go application for myself after not finding a note-taking application I liked. Instead of implementing an editor, the application just creates the `%Y-%m-%d.md` file and then opens it in my preferred editor. I have other features, but in the end, all it does is create files or pipe data into the editor I want to use.

I have the same thing; it's a TUI app written in python; all it does is create files with the proper format and has some mild browsing capabilities. It's super nice.

Mine is even simpler.

  journal                     # opens 2026-03-07.md in vim
  journal yesterday           # opens 2026-03-06.md in vim
  journal weekly              # pipes 2026-03-01 – 07.md into vim
  journal monthly             # pipes 2026-03-01 – 31.md into vim
  journal monthly last month  # pipes 2026-02-01 – 28.md into vim

I added support for other editors. For the editors that don't support stdin, it creates a temporary file for the generated pages ("weekly", "monthly", etc.)

It fits my needs perfectly. It removes the friction of note taking. It's easy to backup, search, convert the notes. If I want to use another editor like a WYSIWYG markdown editor, it's trivial to change.

I've tried a lot of note management but always come back to [potwiki](https://github.com/vim-scripts/potwiki.vim) + "Vim". Only one necessary functional bit in the whole thing, write CamelCase and your word is linked, hit enter on it and you're there.

I really wanted to try this out, because it reminded me of a free version of Ulysses, which I used to (before it became subscription-based) find helped me be very productive. Unfortunately, the latest release wouldn't install:

> "GhostMD" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.

I suspect this is a signing or notarization error.

MacOS only it would appear. Would have loved to try this with my obsidian vault for where I can't use electron.

>No preview pane

How can you even call a program a markdown editor if it does not even render markdown?

Yeah not to dogpile on this, but looking through the commit history, it seems like this was mainly vibe coded? When I think of "Ghostty but for X", I think of.. something the opposite. Love seeing GPUI projects but the marketing makes it seem disingenuous

I think this is actually cool, but that it should use Apple’s own local models by default to minimize the AI usage footprint. They are capable enough to do filing suggestions.

One of my favorite Markdown apps from back was MacDown.

Somebody updated it; it's now called MacDown 3000 [1].

[1]: https://macdown.app

Since ive been giving Claude access to my notes a cli tool to open my vault makes sense, but I'm curious how it has ai features if it's free.

Same question, but coming from a "What if I would rather use an alternative to Claude" angle

So this project is kind of like George Costanza's idea for a show about nothing.

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