Show HN: Write.md – A free, open-source, themeable Markdown editor for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Write.md – A free, open-source, themeable Markdown editor for macOS

writemd.app

107 pointsdanielbilekq78 comments

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I've compromised a lot with Electron (because I finally had to!) but never for a lightweight text editor app. Never!

Here are some alternatives if anyone is looking

https://editorio.crncevic.org

https://macdown.app/ (FOSS)

https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit (FOSS)

And if you must have an electron one then here are some FOSS options https://marktext.me

I want to piggy-back off this: if there must be an electron application, then at least make it available on different platforms

I’m going to post this every time there’s a new markdown to pdf submission: quarto (https://quarto.org) is my go to tool. You can use it in R Studio, visual studio code or the cli. Uses pandoc under the hood, has support for latex and many more niceties.

I've been looking for a markdown editor that let's me print the rendered view and have yet to find one. Which is quite surprising given how many there are. I just use my own webapp for now, should probably open source it in case anyone else is looking for this functionality.

If you know of a nice mac app that let's me easily write / view and print markdown I'd love to hear from you!

not an app per se, but pandoc is great...

I've been using Typora for years. It has a pretty great export/print.

+1 for Typora. One of the things I like is that it gives you some flexibility in how it handles images you drag into a document for embedding purposes.

My favorite option is the one where it automatically colocates assets by creating a folder with the same name as the file, appends `.assets` to it (<filename>.assets), copies the image there, and then automatically sets up the preview and embed.

Obsidian has a pdf export, but it's overkill for just writing

vscode + pandoc ... work like a charm (incl. side by side preview)

most of these editors offer pdf exports and the ones that don't they offer html ones that can easily be exported in the browser too. Isn't this enough?

Recently adopted https://github.com/marktext/marktext as I wanted the editable preview that Obsidian offers, but for all .md, not just items in my vault. I dig it so far. And it does offer printing of the render.

* https://keenwrite.com/

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dCui_hHK6U

My software uses ConTeXt to typeset into PDF.

Are markdown editors the new todo list app?

There so many of them published, and probably thousands more that are someone's introduction to coding and just sitting is a github rotting away.

Not to be banging the same drum - but with AI it's so much easier to write a native app. No need for electron app esp. in the days when RAM costs more than a used car.

Electron? No thanks.

Especially if it's not even cross-platform...

The is refreshing. There are so many writing tools adding AI features and collaboration and everything else that a focused Markdown editor almost feels unusual now. I want to know what made you decide to keep it intentionally focused instead of turning it into a more feature-heavy editor.

How does this compare to Typora? That's the leader in this market as far as I can tell.

much worse than Typora. this is a very basic markdown editor for writing blog posts in "minimalist" space. and it's just free

Paying Typora user here, and wondering the same.

Aside: The Typora website is horrible on mobile.

I've started getting warnings from MacDown about how it'll stop working soon because Rosetta or something. I like the side by side view, but sadly this isn't that.

edit: Oh, electron?!

Yeah, it's an electron app. Is it causing a "not good" feeling on its own, or do you have another suggestion?

That's the app I'm looking for a direct replacement for as well.

There are a ton, there is Typora (paid) and there is https://github.com/joelbqz/writer-computer (Tauri)

But Macdown is a universal binary? https://github.com/schuyler/macdown3000 So it should just keep working

There's a newer MacDown--MacDown 3000 [1]. It's a universal binary, so it'll keep running once Rosetta goes away.

[1]: https://macdown.app

There must be something fascinating about writing Markdown apps - either it scratches an itch, or AI is really good at creating them. There's a flood of them on r/macapps and similar places.

didn't know about that, but when I looked around, most of them were paid and just didn't really scratch the itch. this really starte as a simple editor for writing blog posts

Probably a lot of both.

Writing is also a deeply personal exercise for many, and I can say from personal experience that the environment I write in, from the room/place I'm in to the color scheme of my editor, really matters sometimes.

I haven't found a need to build my own editor, but I can see how someone else would.

It's because it's effectively impossible to make a markdown authoring app that meets everyone's needs, and people tend to be picky about what they want in a writing environment. People have strong preferences about WYSIWYG, flavor of markdown (pandoc/quarto/GFM/etc), theming support, some want notes to be able to link to each other, etc. As an example, I require math notation support for basically everything I write which automatically rules out 90% of markdown editors for me.

All of this, but underlying it I've come to the conclusion that Markdown isn't a good format for a writing environment beyond just simple prose. There's too much left up to the flavour of it and it's got weaknesses.

I've been experimenting with using Markdown (in Typora) in place of Word, but it (and others I've looked at) have zero support for image positioning or sizing, or a way to have different (pre-defined) styles on different tables.

Which is a shame because I like keeping my documents in plain text, in version control and efficiently read by my LLMs. LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) for LaTeX is the closest to what I'm thinking of that I know of, but maybe something exists for Asciidoc or Typst.

In recent years, I've written two!

I wrote my own wiki to use as a personal knowledge base to replace Dokuwiki because I wanted a simpler Markdown-based solution written in Python. I started it during the pandemic times and all of the code in there to date was written by hand. All of it was pretty easy except the CSS/layout parts which I'm just not very good at. It took months of free time to get it where I wanted.

I also recently created a day-to-day notes and daily planner app that's basically a bunch of markdown notes. I spent about a week of free time defining the problem, setting constraints, and refining with an LLM that wrote almost all of the code for me. I've been using it for months and it's working great.

The wiki uses Markdown because I browse it just as often as I edit and I appreciate some modicum of basic formatting. The daily notes app doesn't really _have_ to use markdown, I've just gotten accustomed to writing Markdown pretty much everywhere.

(These are on github, but I'm not posting the links here because I don't want to or care about promoting them.)

Abashedly raises hand as someone who's also written his own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah, it's easier to made them now then before.

I've made myself two editors recently:

https://wander.md - WYSIWYG editor that works on mac, iphone and iPad and has semantic versioning backend in.

https://original.me - fully native macOS editor that uses Apple Notes as backend.

those are ver interesting to build, but also way more possible. I think it would have take me years before.

When there is a cost. Please show it on the website. I couldn’t find if for wander.

wander is free.

i will add optional wander-native cloud sync and would probably charge for that.

I thought it would compare to iA Writer, but misread

I suspect it's because there's a flood of people writing / looking at MD docs that never did before and want better tooling than is readily known to exist.

I think we're going to see a lot of dev-related tooling that traditional developers would scratch their head and think... who could this possibly be for, and why would anyone spend time making this...

And it's just because there's an entirely new class of people doing this kind of thing now.

I always have a hard time understanding why anyone would want a dedicated markdown editor in the first place.

Obviously I am not the intended audience for them, but for me markdown is a fundamentally plain text format, Make nice looking plain text, and if you keep to certain well known patterns, you get a chance to run it through a typeset engine. Most of the point being the plain text. If the point were the typeset document, I would pick a better language.

As such, the ideal markdown editor is a text editor.

a nice md editor feels good. when all the UI is out of the way it gives a minimalism feel and i start to notice tiny details like 'this font is really soothing' and thats where i imagine i want to put my markdown thoughts in. a pure interface

explorations in minimalism

Since it's Electron why not have a Windows version of the app too?

I mean, most of us already use either IDE or a text editor for work, so why not just type non-work markdown files in them? Be it VS Code or JetBrains.

Thread hijacking but, I wonder more why Apple keeps the built-in TextEdit at its crappy state, it would be a fantastic text editor if fixed

Exactly - I have been using VS code for work as well as non-work markdown for more than 5 years now. Never had to look for any other note-taking tool.

how is it different from obsidian?

it does much less, not really an alternative to Obsidian

Obsidian's closed-source is it not?

Amazing job on this

Honestly the first time I’ve seen an app use the glass aesthetic as a selling point

tbh I kinda dig the glass aesthetic. I understand it's not for anyone, that's why you can theme it

I wish we can have a good markdown support with images ala GitHub (good days).

But GitHub has _bad_ Markdown support. GFM is the reason why so many projects on GitHub are besot with Markdown that's unreadable in a text editor.

ANOTHER.md

YETANOTHER.md

YETANOTHERAGAIN.md

And of course it is MORE Electron bullshit to add to the “never install” pile. Christ. If I wanted to do everything inside a browser I WOULD FREAKING USE A BROWSER.

Why is everybody so stoked about Markdown? Isn't Asciidoc better in about every aspect?

Because with formats it's always about what's the most common, not what's necessarily the best or the most powerful one for one specific use case.

Every AI agent creates markdown files, Google Docs supports markdown etc.

I'm not sure people seeing "Made for Apple silicon" will expect an Electron app.

That's fair enough. I'll change that, so it doesn't seem misleading

I recently migrated a few of my Electron apps to Tauri -- was easy and fast in my case -- went down from 130mb installer to 3mb installer. Worth considering!

https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer <- 130mb to 3mb from Electron to Tauri

will expect an Electron app.

Whoops! Thanks for the warning. I'm out.

Shame, too. I've been looking for a new text editor. Someone else in this thread recommended SubEtha. I'll take a look there, instead. Happy to keep my Mac Electron-free.

Out of curiosity; how come?

A web browser is one of the most complex pieces of software developed by human civilization, there should be no need to ship one with each and every trivial to semi-trivial app.

Some people think it’s bad performance and bloat. They learned it ten years ago and haven’t questioned it

So what’s the alternative, Tauri?

I've made some personal custom apps with it, it works pretty well. With the latest version you can also choose what language to use on the backend side, so you aren't limited to just the original Tauri + Rust framework and can also use Tauri + Node/Typescript (still faster than Electron since you don't need to bundle Chromium + Node) or Tauri + Swift / Kotlin / Go / etc.

Both Tauri and Electron are excellent

Out of curiosity; how come?

Speed. Efficiency. UI consistency. Cross-program features that nearly every "framework" fails at.

On my macOS machines, I make an effort to only use native apps. I can't speak for what Apple ships with the OS, but AFAIK, everything I've added is native.

Perhaps it's just a placebo effect, but everything on my five-year-old personal M1 MacBook Pro feels just as snappy as the mixed bag on my two-year-old work M4 MacBook Pro.

I can recommend Bear (https://bear.app) been using for ~6 years or more. Truly native and 100% macOS-ish.

One time purchase, then I would have been interested. Yeah, a free version, but subscription…

It's 2026, I always expect an Electron app, unfortunately

There's also MarkEdit[0], which is essentially "TextEdit for Markdown" and is definitely _not_ Electron-based:

> For perspective: at just 4 MB, MarkEdit is much smaller than Electron apps. Handling a 10 MB file with ease puts it ahead of TextKit-based editors. Performance-first editors built with Rust lack native features, while correctness alone rules out editors that rely on regex-based Markdown parsing.

[0]: https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit

small bit of feedback, "Rice it until it feels like yours." is pretty jargon heavy for a landing page, i don't think all that many people outside linux/tech use that term, why not "customize"?

think that's valid. gonna change that. thanks!

i don't think all that many people outside linux/tech use that term,

The term is quite a bit older than today's tech bubble.

It came out of hotrod car modification clubs that specialize in Japanese brands. Some consider it pejorative. (See: "rice rocket.")

It's funny that you say not many people outside of Linux/tech use that term when "ricing" started in car mod culture. It was used to describe the act of customizing your (typically Japanese import, hence the term "rice") car with an abundance of cosmetic mods, without investing in performance mods. So your car would look really sleek and custom on the surface, but it would still drive like a stock '94 Honda CR-X del Sol.

Before anyone asks: "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" is a backronym, not the origin of the phrase.

For Macs, there is iA Writer already. Why don't you make something equally polished for other platforms? I am genuinely interested, I always wanted iA Writer for Linux. Everything I tried falls short.

iA writer: neither free nor open source

SubEthaEdit is still around and open source. It supports Markdown side-by-side view along with numerous other languages. Excellent lightweight (26mb, native) editor, available directly via the macOS store at no cost.

https://subethaedit.net

No image support though.

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