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Typora: A truly minimal markdown editor
- josephhurtado 7y agoBeautiful editor, one of my favorites, and surprisingly free and multi-platform: works in Mac OS, Windows and Linux.
- mwexler 7y agoFree now, but out of beta, will have some type of pricing model, accd to the site. Just saying.
- ta0xdeadbeef 7y agoLaTeX coverage is as much as I need, and it renders to SVG when exporting as HTML. You've got yourself one more user!
- hcarvalhoalves 7y agoI like the WYSIWYG and there's a handful of useful features, good job!
- atoav 7y agoUsing this since at least two years and it constantly got better and expanded. The one thing that I still love this for is that it starts quick and it is a incredible way to explain markdown to beginners. One thing that could improve is the update mechanism which sometimes distrafts you from writing at startup, but that is really a tiny nitpick.
- lawry 7y agoI think this is one of the only wysiwyg editors for markdown with latex support. Have been using it for the past half year and it works like a charm!
- kunai 7y agoHard to say that it is "truly minimal" when it uses Electron. There was a time when 75MB of memory usage would have been considered absolutely massive for an application with similar functionality. Nice UI though.
- thunderbong 7y agoI think the 'truly minimal' refers to the UI!
- brazzy 7y agoThere was also a time when vi was considered a memory hog with crazy feature creep.
- kunai 7y agoAbiWord, a word processor with far more rich text features, .doc export, support for multimedia images and charts, etc. uses 4MB of memory on a blank page. There is no legitimate reason for Typora to use literally 18 times the RAM as a fully fledged office application.
- swebs 7y agoI don't remember that at all. Are you sure you're not thinking of emacs?
- brazzy 7y agoNope, definitely vi. I have a vintage book about Unix written ca. 1980, and the author's concern was that "vi's code segment will fill up most of the main memory of a large PDP-11, leaving you little space for the text you're editing". They considered their university's heavily modified fork of ed (the standard text editor, remember?) to be a better choice.
- mceachen 7y agoFWIW, by 1988 the shared servers on UC campuses were sufficiently provisioned to happily run vi, compiler toolchains, and MUDs for several hundred concurrent users.
- dspillett 7y agoThere was a time when vi and some of its variants (for instance vim) were considered relatively heavy, at least on shared servers. I'm thinking back to my Uni days with two rooms full of vt100 clones all connected to one poor box and people telnet-ing in from other locations too (SSH was pretty much brand new at that point so wasn't available). Of course emacs was worse, but there were even leaner options than vi/vim/related too.
- dddw 7y agoI use it to make quit drafts, real nice to instantly have markdown markup. would tip this to people who start wqrint in markdown
- keroro 7y agoAlso check out the near-identical open source clone, marktext. Typora will no longer be free once out of beta. https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
- johnisgood 7y agoWow thank you so much!
- mikeruhl 7y agothis is really good to know. I've been using Typora for the past year and, at this point, I can't live without it for making md files before committing. Thanks!
- haraball 7y agoThanks for sharing, this editor has quite a few nice features! Using @ for quickly inserting different markdown formattings is a nice touch compared to having to remember them.
- thomasfl 7y agoThanks! Typora looks like fork of Mark Text. Their both very good.
- stanislavb 7y agoAlso, here it is a list with even more alternatives https://www.saashub.com/typora-alternatives https://www.saashub.com/typora-alternatives
- yboris 7y agoI also love the AlternativeTo as a resource for alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/typora/ https://alternativeto.net/software/typora/
- VvR-Ox 7y agoThank you so much! I am addicted to Typora and this looks like it could get close. I'll try it and hopefully be able to switch before it's too late. The idea to make a md-editor really WYSIWYG in the same window is a killer feature. Of course MD exists so you don't have to bother with layout etc. but in my opinion I also don't have to see the formatting code (even if it's MD) once it is applied. This solution for me is the best to write texts, blog posts etc. as it is the maximum of distraction-free I ever saw.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mjclemente 7y agoAfter trying nearly every markdown editor out there (Mou, Byword, Macdown, iA Writer, and Caret, to name a few), I found Typora. I've been using it for the past year and find it delightful - it does everything that I want a markdown editor to do, in an elegant and intuitive way. I'm not tied to the company in any way, just really love the software (and hope it succeeds). I'll happily pay to support it when it comes out of beta.
- hs86 7y agoMost features can be covered by a few VSCode extensions like these: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yzhang.markdown-all-in-one https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yzhang.m... https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mushan.vscode-paste-image https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mushan.v... Other code editors probably have similar extensions and syncing the notes could be done with Dropbox/git/whatever... I am also surprised how well https://tabnine.com/ https://tabnine.com/ works with auto-completion for arbitrary notes.
- Sendotsh 7y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. I'm a Typora user who had no idea VSCode had a markdown extension. I just played with it, and it's really good, and I'll probably switch to it now as I already have VSCode open most of the time.
- VvR-Ox 7y agoYes this is nice but you can't really compare it to a standalone app like Typora / MarkText besides how it handles the content. Some people don't need the 1k features VS Code gives you but some really good, minimalist editor to write MD with latex, images etc. I would not install an IDE to achieve this.
- tsp 7y agoI tried about every noteworthy Markdown editor in recent years. Typora is the one I am still using. Great work. I hope they don’t ask for a subscription fee, but one time payment, once out of beta.
- VvR-Ox 7y ago+1 I'll pay one time but only if they open source it.
- nyxcharon 7y agoYeah agreed. I remember trying around 15 different dedicated editors and Typora was the first one to really grab my attention. I've been using it ever since. I don't usually buy much software, but would be happy to buy Typora if it was a one time payment.
- app4soft 7y agoIs there any JavaScript-free WYSIWYG Markdown editor?
- tiborsaas 7y agoMaybe this: https://github.com/tcr/edit-text https://github.com/tcr/edit-text But yeah, most browser based WYSIWYG editors are JS based, since you need to manipulate the DOM. If you are not targeting the browser then you maybe find something here: https://philippegroarke.com/posts/2018/c++_ui_solutions/ https://philippegroarke.com/posts/2018/c++_ui_solutions/
- app4soft 7y ago> Maybe this: https://github.com/tcr/edit-text https://github.com/tcr/edit-text Nope, this is not what I expected for: > Both the server and client are written in Rust, and its frontend is cross-compiled WebAssembly and TypeScript.
- bchanudet 7y agoOn Linux I found Ghostwriter¹. It's working really fine, I use it for all my personal writings. There is also a port² on Windows but it seems less reliable, I've seen it crash a few times, I still have to report it or try to fix it. ¹ https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/ https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/ ² https://github.com/michelolvera/vs-ghostwriter https://github.com/michelolvera/vs-ghostwriter
- app4soft 7y agoGhostwriter depend on QtWebKit/QtWebEngine, so is not JavaScript-free. > HTML preview has been ported from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine (Chromium).
- bchanudet 7y agoYeah the HTML preview is using QtWebEngine, but not the text editor part. I suppose there is a way to deactivate Javascript execution in QtWebEngine but I don't know enough about it. But given that Markdown allows inline HTML and JavaScript, I don't see how you could have an accurate WYSIWYG representation if you don't have a Javascript engine available somewhere.
- nickjj 7y agoAre most of you using dedicated markdown editors? What about using your code editor's markdown plugin and real time preview in a browser? For example with Vim, one of the plugins launches a browser and then you get a real time preview while you type in Vim. The nice thing is you can tell it to use a specific CSS file so you can get a 100% copy of GitHub's README styles. It even syncs your cursor if you want that behavior. I demo'd the above set up here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/writing-and-previewing-markdown-in-real-time-with-vim-8 https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/writing-and-previewing-markdo...
- abfar 7y agoI also just use Vim to write markdowns, but without any markdown plugins (beside the built-in markdown syntax highlighting in Vim) and I compile the document to pdf manually using Pandoc. I rarely need to write markdowns though, and my usage is not advanced at all (like to write simple writeups that sometimes require maths and code blocks, which I only use for myself). So Vim + Pandoc is enough for me.
- xrisk 7y agoDo you know how you can render the PDF to make it look like Github's HTML render?
- ScottFree 7y agoIn my opinion, markdown is a document format not unlike Rich Text Format (RTF). I want a program to read it, style it and let me edit it the way it's intended to be read. I don't want to see the code unless the program is getting in my way. I'm sure everybody's come across a text editor that insists you meant to indent that next bullet point and gets very stubborn when you want to do something different. That's what I like about Typora. I don't have to think about the code until I want to do something the program doesn't want me to do. When that happens, I can switch to code view and make it do exactly what I want it to do. Then I switch back WYSIWG mode and keep going.
- nickjj 7y ago
- __m 7y agoYou can’t beat a plain texteditor or html form in terms of minimalism. Seems like the wrong point to highlight
- VvR-Ox 7y agoThen you did not understand the main feature of Typora & Co: _real WYSIWYG_ writing MD in various flavors. Don't try to tell anyone a plain editor could even begin to compete - it is about MD being applied while you type and then quickly getting out of your way.
- BenGosub 7y agoI have used Boostnote and Remarkable, on Ubuntu. After using Boostnote for a while, it started to bug me because it's slow load time (it's an Electron app), so I searched for something native and found Remarkable, which is simple and really fast. It just lacks some of the organization features that Boostnote offers.
- jawarner 7y agoI liked Remarkable initially. But its development has stopped with bugs outstanding. One is that typing with live-preview enabled jumps the viewport to the top. Typora seems nicer.
- CareyB 7y agoWow! WordPerfect reimagined.
- cik 7y agoI'm happier with retext (https://github.com/retext-project/retext https://github.com/retext-project/retext). Fully open-sourced, live preview, and taking ~50% less resources than Typora to deliver the same features. If I'm not using vim, I'm in live preview mode in retext.
- dmytton 7y agoDue to the bugs in Apple Notes on macOS 10.15 and iOS 13, I just spent some time evaluating as many note taking apps for Mac as possible. I ended up picking https://ia.net/writer https://ia.net/writer Typora was interesting but it was very buggy, and doesn't handle tags which are important for notes. My main criteria were an open file format, ideally editing plain text files on disk using Markdown as the formatting. This ruled out apps like OneNote, InkDrop, Standard Notes and others. If you don't mind about having a proprietary database so long as the data can be exported to Markdown, https://bear.app https://bear.app is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device. I will also be interested in https://nvultra.com/ https://nvultra.com/ once it comes out of private beta. I published my full writeup today at https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-markdown-open-format-cross-platform/ https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-m...
- austhrow743 7y agoFYI OneNote is free and in Bear you can export all notes at once to markdown which if coming from Notes you may not have thought to try. Can have a folder with all of your notes stored in markdown within a couple seconds.
- peternicky 7y agoonenote is a whole different ballgame than the editors in this thread. Onenote does not support markdown and is essentially a stripped down "word" variation.
- Shinkirou 7y agoWhat a very complete and interesting writeup, thank you for sharing. I've also recently started using iA Writer, on Win 10 and Android. The program is solid to a fault and extremely well designed, with the flexibility of saving .md files that you can save and export everywhere. Highly recommended!
- jason_slack 7y agoI have been using IA Writer too, but it doesn't support GitHub flavor markdown. So sometimes when I take content from IA Writer and paste it into GitHub (or even Discourse) the formatting and specifics are off or just not working without massaging things a bit. For my every day writings and academic pursuits IA Writer does work really well.
- mwexler 7y agoI keep coming back to simplenote (https://app.simplenote.com/ https://app.simplenote.com/) each time I try one of these "minimal markdown editors". Works on every platform I've tried, open source, and maintained. I enjoy seeing folks making improvements to the minimal model, but I personally haven't found any life-changing enough to switch. Keep recommending options, though, I'm looking forward to seeing what folks create!
- cliff_badger 7y agoHas anyone found a decent solution to real time rendering of ReStructruedText (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText)?
- esher 7y agoBeen using Typora for almost two years. Really like it. Use cases might be a bit limited. Using Notion.so on work.
- dagdesheren 7y agoIt’s OK but not that astonishing. Still prefer to write in the default notepad because it just werks