I like ghostwriter. Its a simple KDE app, but i use KDE so it perfectly suits my needs.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Assuming youβre running Linux and donβt need any advanced features, Apostrophe works well. Obsidian is also a great cross-platform option.
But what if I need advanced features ?
Zettlr might work well for you
Joplin? More of a note taking app in general though.
I use Joplin daily, but its main disadvantage is the huge resource footprint, specially compared to a regular text editor with markdown highlighting.
The main advantages are that its cross platform, mobile, self-syncable, and E2EE. I think itβs better then even Obsidian.
Mermaid support is the cherry on the cake, although I still use a simple text editor for quick markdown notes.
This. It is also self-hostable
If by GUI you mean WYSIWYG, I don't know of any! Very mysterious to me why this has not been properly taken on given the popularity of markdown.
Once every year or so I check out everything that's available and try out any new or upgraded packages I can find. All have at least one of the following issues:
- Massive bloat, often electron is significant culprit
- Stuck on the 2 column editor concept, generally with only rudimentary markdown implementation
- Fly by night new projects which are quickly abandoned in beta state
- Only want to access files within a certain subdirectory which may or may not be configurable; this is rarely the only problem but it's very common in the PKM-type packages
I never quite got it to work properly but Zettlr suits some people. You might be able to cobble something together in Codium. Both those have the bloat issue. There are some self hosted browser-based editors if you are interested in that sort of project. The best and closest I have found is Joplin but it isn't actually a markdown editor. I wish someone would spin an editor off from its code base; surely the skeleton is there.
org mode and pandoc :P
I was looking for something GUI
yes but gestures at spaceship it is org mode tho!
Also using MarkText & also interested in this.
Ideally I'd like something like a Markdown word processor with toolbar & buttons to do things:
- to tide me over until I learn the shortcuts
- to overcome shortcuts that don't work on my keyboard (MarkText at least offers a GUI way to remap shortcuts. Typora had 80% broken shortcuts & expected me to hack a JSON to fix their shit. And what passed for instructions on that didn't work.)
I switched to Apostrophe from MarkText: https://apps.gnome.org/en/Apostrophe/
It's not as WYSIWYG as MarkText, but close enough. It has buttons, but it wasn't a requirement for me. I use (and love) Gnome, and wanted something gtk based to blend in my DE.
Geany with Markdown plugin
How does one make that plugin work on geany ?
it generates an html preview in a sidebar.
the benefit over any other 2 column editor is that geany is a real text editor with lots of shortcuts, configs and tools. so the editing part is a lot better. markdown is just kind of tacked on though.
I just started using Trilium on my homelab. It's got a lot more than just markdown, but also supports markdown.
Isn't that a self-hosted app ?
You can install the desktop app and use it without a remote server. (It installs a βlocal serverβ.) (Apparently. I haven't used it, but that's what the website and their docs say.)
I use Markor on my phone and Notepad++ on my computer.
I also have Obsidian, which isn't FOSS and is built to save files with every change which I don't like, but has some nice display features. I mostly use that one for viewing Markdown files, and the other two for writing them.
What about LogSeq ?
I looked into it a while back, but it seemed more complicated than I needed it to be, and was oriented around notes being written on certain dates. What I wanted to set up was something more like a simple markdown wiki, with interlinked pages.
I like Zettlr, mainly because of its note linking & citing capabilities. I used it while working on my thesis (for notes & summaries, not for the whole text).
CryptPad is a browser-based office suite like Google Workspace, and one of its document types is rich text, text that can be italics, ~strikethrough~, subscript, βββββββand stuff.
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|Who knows?|* It's worth experimenting with compatibility* But this is turning into a self-demonstrating comment|
|I'm still trying it myself|It doesn't look bad|
You can export those as Markdown.
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