Using 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.
Hard 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.
Nope, 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.
FWIW, by 1988 the shared servers on UC campuses were sufficiently provisioned to happily run vi, compiler toolchains, and MUDs for several hundred concurrent users.
There 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.
AbiWord, 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.
I agree, but I feel it's justified using Electron in this case, because Markdown can be combined with any HTML. So when you need a rendering engine, you might as well use Chromium's from Electron.
Typora is probably the best Electron app I've ever seen, but I ultimately switched to the MarkdownLivePreview package for Sublime Text. I definitely prefer having a more native app over Electron.
this 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!
Thanks 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.
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.
After 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.
Not 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.
Yes 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.
I 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.
Yeah 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.
Yeah 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.
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 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.
In 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.
One benefit I guess is you don't need a dedicated program and you can continue using your code editor. You also have full control of what the render looks like (which is helpful for GitHub READMEs).
Also with Vim (I can't speak for other editors) it has the option of concealing the markdown characters themselves so it looks more like a rendering of it. I don't use that personally but if you prefer not seeing the noise of backticks for code blocks or double asterisks for bold you can hide it.
You don't seem to be getting the point. Vim is for code. Typora is for documents. They are different tools tailored specifically for different jobs. You wouldn't use microsoft word to write code, would you?
If you like vim and want to use it for markdown, that's great. I personally like a more specialized tool. Then again, I'm also a writer and spend more time in that mode than most programmers. If you spend all your time programming and only occasionally need to write a markdown document, then I can see the appeal of the setup you're describing.
I spend about 50% of my time programming and 50% writing. I often deal with 300,000+ word markdown files because part of what I do for a living is write technical courses. I've written about a million words of markdown over the last ~5 years.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ different strokes for different folks, man. Most of what I write is fiction. Some of that fiction also serves as functional requirement documents. :D
I use vim for markdown editing, but I've been searching for a better alternative. Mainly, I want to be able to easily copy-paste between the editor and other programs. This is hard with vim because yank doesn't pull into the system clipboard by default. In my 11 years of working with vim, I've only found a reliable way to configure that behaviour twice, but it stopped working.
> Mainly, I want to be able to easily copy-paste between the editor and other programs. This is hard with vim because yank doesn't pull into the system clipboard by default. In my 11 years of working with vim, I've only found a reliable way to configure that behaviour twice, but it stopped working.
If you run Vim with +clipboard support then you can yank things directly to and from your system clipboard by setting `set clipboard=unnamedplus`.
Then Vim copy / pasting will work seamlessly like any other program on your system.
You can also have it seamlessly work with tmux too and even with WSL if you're using terminal Vim in Windows through WSL.
Then 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I'm happier with 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.
Due 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
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 is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device.
I will also be interested in https://nvultra.com/ once it comes out of private beta.
What 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!
I 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.
After reading your review, lack of tags and "Electron" were you biggest complaints against Typora. Typora is not a notes manger, and reviewing it for what it's not trying to be, is unfair. As for electron, despite the perception of being a hog, Typora's resource usage is about 150MB in RAM and 0.5% CPU when idle. I think your modern MacBook pro can trivially handle that.
In my opinion, Typora's advantages are:
1. WYSIWYG markdown. I don't believe iAWriter is WYSIWYG. While that's ok for developers, Typora is more widely usable.
2. Extensions: from Mermaid, LateX, sequence diagrams to code highlighting, to export to ePub (via Pandoc), Typora is a lot more versatile
3. Saves files as text (.md) and assets, easily searchable via OS. Highly portable
FYI 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.
onenote is a whole different ballgame than the editors in this thread. Onenote does not support markdown and is essentially a stripped down "word" variation.
I keep coming back to simplenote (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!
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadOne thing that could improve is the update mechanism which sometimes distrafts you from writing at startup, but that is really a tiny nitpick.
Nice UI though.
There is no legitimate reason for Typora to use literally 18 times the RAM as a fully fledged office application.
[1] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/MarkdownLivePreview
https://github.com/marktext/marktext
https://alternativeto.net/software/typora/
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.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yzhang.m...
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/ works with auto-completion for arbitrary notes.
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.
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/
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.
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/
² https://github.com/michelolvera/vs-ghostwriter
> HTML preview has been ported from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine (Chromium).
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.
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-markdo...
Also with Vim (I can't speak for other editors) it has the option of concealing the markdown characters themselves so it looks more like a rendering of it. I don't use that personally but if you prefer not seeing the noise of backticks for code blocks or double asterisks for bold you can hide it.
If you like vim and want to use it for markdown, that's great. I personally like a more specialized tool. Then again, I'm also a writer and spend more time in that mode than most programmers. If you spend all your time programming and only occasionally need to write a markdown document, then I can see the appeal of the setup you're describing.
If you run Vim with +clipboard support then you can yank things directly to and from your system clipboard by setting `set clipboard=unnamedplus`.
Then Vim copy / pasting will work seamlessly like any other program on your system.
You can also have it seamlessly work with tmux too and even with WSL if you're using terminal Vim in Windows through WSL.
Here's a video that demos how it all works and also has a link to my dotfiles: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/getting-copy-paste-to-work-in...
_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.
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 is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device.
I will also be interested in 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-m...
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!
For my every day writings and academic pursuits IA Writer does work really well.
In my opinion, Typora's advantages are:
1. WYSIWYG markdown. I don't believe iAWriter is WYSIWYG. While that's ok for developers, Typora is more widely usable.
2. Extensions: from Mermaid, LateX, sequence diagrams to code highlighting, to export to ePub (via Pandoc), Typora is a lot more versatile
3. Saves files as text (.md) and assets, easily searchable via OS. Highly portable
4. Cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux)
From the site:
"Typora provides both file tree panel and articles (file list) panel, allows you to manage your files easily."
Using Notion.so on work.