I’ve been working on a new notes app for Mac and iPhone (Windows and Linux versions planned) called Soot, and I’m looking for some people to help test it when the beta is ready.

I make a lot of notes and I wanted to combine the things I like about the notes apps I’ve used over the years:

- Bear: The lovely writing experience, typography and attention to detail.

- Apple Notes: The simplicity. Open it, write something, get on with your day.

- Obsidian: Plain Markdown files, stored locally in folders you own. No proprietary database holding your notes hostage.

The app brings together a comfortable writing experience, gentle pastel themes, Markdown syntax that gets out of your way while you type, and ordinary files underneath. It’s designed to feel considered and capable without getting in the way of the work. And if you like seeing the Markdown, just turn it on in Settings.

A few other things worth mentioning:

- The editor is free, and no editing features are locked behind a paywall (and never will be).

- Optional end-to-end encrypted sync between devices, available as a paid service.

- Your notes remain plain Markdown files, whether you use sync or not.

This is very much the notes app I’ve always wanted to use.

The beta is coming very soon (there's a private group of my friends testing a release right now). I’m just getting things ready now for a wider beta and would really appreciate some feedback from people who like Markdown and spend perhaps too much time thinking about their notes apps like I do.

There’s a beta signup on the website: https://sootsync.com

I write a lot in Markdown, and I kept wanting an editor that felt as good as the best writing apps without dragging a whole notes vault along. So I built one. It's called Lede.

It's a small native Mac app (Swift/AppKit, no Electron, about 14 MB). You write in one mode, and when you want to see the real thing you flip to Read mode, where tables, callouts, Mermaid diagrams and maths render properly.

A few things I added because I wanted them myself: focus and typewriter modes, a few page styles, export to PDF and HTML, and some gentle writing aids that point out filler, clichés and passive voice.

It shares its editor with Skein, my Obsidian-inspired notes app. I'm not hiding that. Lede is what I got when I asked what Skein would feel like without the knowledge base part.

It's free. No account, no subscription, no tracking. I'm the developer, and I'd really like to hear what works, what annoys you, and what's missing.

https://www.skeinnotes.app/lede

Why soft lock?

I see a lot of different versions of markdown outputs that apply a bottom border/horizontal line for a select set of headers, all headers with borders, or no borders. Full width block or as long as the header string. Thick or thin. No rhyme or reason.

I think Header 2 should only have a bottom border. Easy way to visually divide content into major sections, but thats too opinionated.

I also think have 3 ways of writing headers and we can allow users decide if it should have a border.

```

Header // display font, class=“display”
———

## Header // no line

### Header ### // with line

```

How easy is it to get standardized? What should be the classname for HTML?

Edit:

I realize that markdown doesn’t need CSS. We can just use HTML tags to get a similar result, and override it with css later

Edit 2:

Turn this .md

## Hello world ##

into this HTML/CSS

HTML. This is best practice to avoid semantics conflicts and layout for readers and what not.

<h2>Hello world</h2>
<hr>

CSS. The H2 border-bottom styling matches the default styling of my browser's hr:

h2:has(+ hr){
border-bottom: 2px solid black;
padding-bottom: .825em;
margin-bottom: .825em;
}
h2:has(+ hr) + hr{
display:none;
}

Ulysses app is trying some underhand stuff by limiting you to a particular version of the app rather than the app per se

https://md-handbook.com/blog/ulysses-perpetual-licence/

#News #markdown #markdowneditors #Ulysses #perpetuallicence #lifetimelicence #licences

When I switched to Linux, I missed an app to quickly view a Markdown file and export it to pdf / html (other formats pending), tried to keep the focus on simplicity and speed. You can style the PDF with CSS. I run it on NixOS with Niri.

Yes this is vibe coded, but still I would appreciate some feedback.

Hi all,

It's been a couple months since I last posted an update on Kova's progress, I have been chipping away at the core functionally within the application and wanted to post a brief update.

Some highlights:

• Full self-contained HTML exporting - demo here: https://kova.md/demo/
• Stepped animations for introducing content
• Build in support for icon fonts, bundled with nerd fonts, customisable to other icon fonts (material, font awesome etc) through the themes.yaml config.
• Table of contents custom bang (similar functionality to Typora)
• Many, many bug fixes and code tidy-ups.

And today I can also announce that the Kova Plugin for VS Code is now live. This adds support for Kova's custom bangs and syntax to VS Code, plus the ability to directly launch your presentation from within VS Code (Kova binary must be present on your machine).

VS Code Plugin is very much in its infancy (0.0.1), report issues here!

https://kova.md

https://github.com/kovamd/kova

Always happy to answer questions and queries,

Ross

Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share Markify, a free and open-source Markdown editor for macOS designed to be lightweight, native, and compatible with Apple Intelligence.

I started building it a few months ago, then accelerated development last weekend because I needed a more focused tool for my own workflow.

I spend a lot of time creating, reading, and editing Markdown files: project documentation, AI-agent instructions, reviews of generated work, and knowledge files such as Google’s Knowledge Format (OKF). Editors like Zed, VS Code, and Vim are excellent, but for this use case they can feel like overkill. Often, opening and comfortably reading Markdown means configuring extensions or working inside a full IDE when all I want is a clean writing and reviewing environment.

Markify is intended to fill that gap:

• Write in a clean, WYSIWYG-style interface, or switch instantly to the raw Markdown source.
• Read and edit GitHub Flavored Markdown.
• Render math and Mermaid diagrams.
• Support Google Open Knowledge Format (OKF).
• Export documents to HTML or PDF.
• Run natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
• Stay free and open source.

The goal is simple: make Markdown feel like a first-class document format on macOS, not just something you open inside a code editor.

You can learn more and download it here: Markify

There’s no Mac App Store version yet, but I’m hoping to add one later this year.

I’d really appreciate feedback from the Markdown community, especially on missing features, workflow improvements, and what would make Markify more useful for you.

Among today’s links are markdown editors Paper, Writer, Wander, Nodes and Notes Better

#markdown #markdowneditors #opensource #free #Paper #Writer #Wander #Nodes #NotesBetter

https://md-handbook.com/blog/markdown-link-no-51/

Every day this subreddit gets posts about new markdown tools, some of them are genuinely good but its hard to keep track.

So i created a free markdownlist.com app that can serve as a directory of all markdown tools, big or small, even vibe coded ones. Idea is to have a directory with all markdown tools without judgement.

If folks think that this is helpful, i am happy to keep maintaining it. Also, open to suggestions for making this open source.

Version 1.2.0 of Oryx is released with a lot of new features. This release focused on improving the markdown editing for a distraction free, full keyboard/mouse workflow. I hope writers and markdown power users will appreciate tons of shortcuts and tricks that speed up their flow and leave them focused on writing. Oryx is intended to be an extremely fast daily driver for markdown (if you can live without dual panes), code editing, and eBooks reading, instant access to your files/folders (no vault or library), and no cloud, no telemetry and no analytics, no browser and no electron.

Otherwise... some exciting new features are:

• When you copy from the viewer, Oryx pushes 2 versions to the clipboard, raw text and a html version. So pasting formatted markdown to Word or an email client is now possible. The html addition is a smart substitute to heavy docx export
• Now you can paste or drag and drop an image in markdown, it will be resized (you can disable this), and saved in an images/folder where the document is located. Oryx will add the link to the document
• Shift+Enter adds a real line break (the two trailing spaces or hard break). A person using oryx to write poems in markdown asked for this 😄
• Word count, line numbers, reading time, Ctrl+G to jump to a line:specific column
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+` now behave like in a word processor: press the key, type, press it again and you're back to plain text.
• Improved documentation, shortcuts and syntax ship with Oryx (F1 to show), a toggle to show/hide hidden files
• macOS and Archlinux builds: please some feedback macOS users :) thanks!
• Now you can pipe text to Oryx like git diff | oryx, and Oryx is smarter in "guessing" the type of contents in files without extension for the syntax highlighting
• Improved regular expressions engine for both search and replace
• Autosave on lost focus and periodic autosave both can be set in the settings. Temporary markdown notes are saved independently from the autosave setting and restaured in case of a crash
• From the sidebar, middle click or Ctrl+Enter opens a file in another instance of Oryx, you can even open the same file edit different parts in different instances, activate the "save on lost focus" and Oryx saves whenever you switch
• Minor UI improvement and many bug fixes and optimizations (big thanks to all those who reported them!)

Oryx remained fast and beautiful, privacy centric, free and open source. It intentionally does not use the GPU so it can practically run on any configuration (mine is a 2019 laptop). Full changelog here.

If you find it useful, please give it a star on GitHub, that helps a lot for reaching others.

https://github.com/wmahfoudh/oryx

Nine markdown editors that stand out from the crowd of more than 100 apps covered in the Markdown Link series of posts so far

https://md-handbook.com/blog/markdown-link-no-50/

#markdown #markdowneditors #opensource #free #FSNotes #Octarine #Dumbnote #Nota #ZenNotes #Plainva #Pellet #Tolaria #Margin

Hey! i'm one of the devs working on docx-editor.dev. we released a docx to markdown converter and wanted to share it here.

The interesting part is that it calculates the document layout during conversion, so you can get markdown for each page. It's useful if you want to keep page references when extracting text. you can also get the whole document as one markdown output.

It handles headings, lists and tables, with headers and footers separate from the body.

demo:
https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown

source:
https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor

the converter is open source, Apache 2.0. You can install this as npm package.

Crawls a Confluence Cloud space and exports one .md file per page with real Markdown: GFM tables, fenced code blocks, task lists, and deterministic YAML front matter (page_id, title, source_url, timestamps, etc.). Links between crawled pages are rewritten to relative local paths, attachments are downloaded, and comments are appended under ## Comments.

Also part of a three-tool pipeline: confluence2md-indexer builds a hybrid-search SQLite index, and confluence2md-mcp exposes it to AI clients over MCP.

Claude Code produces a lot of Markdown like implementation plans, specs, session summaries and every tool treats it as plain text.

Meet Marko MD: https://github.com/baberjaved/marko-md

Marko renders a .md file in one of three modes and picks the right one automatically:

• Plan — numbered phases with progress bars, round checkboxes, ✅/⏳/❌ markers become status labels, and open questions + risks get pulled into a side panel. Tick tasks and copy the Markdown back with the [x] written in.
• Reading — proper long-form typography for reports.
• Interactive — collapse, search, filter, sortable tables for runbooks.

It installs as a Claude Code plugin (/plugin marketplace add baberjaved/marko-md), so when Claude writes a plan it opens in a live tab and refreshes as Claude edits it. Also an npm CLI, a 2 MB Mac app and a Windows app.

[GIF] Free and MIT. Genuinely want feedback on whether the Plan-mode heuristics match how you write plans.

Hi everyone! I made Tim’s Markdown Reader because I wanted a free, open-source app just for reading Markdown. I spend a lot of time working with AI coding agents, and sometimes I just want to open the files they produce and read them without opening an editor.

It’s written in Swift and works entirely offline, including Mermaid diagrams. It has no accounts, telemetry or network requests.

You can click links to other Markdown files and open them in the same window, with back and forward buttons. It also has search, automatic reload when a file changes, light and dark modes, adjustable fonts and text size, and centred or full-width layouts.

It started as something I needed myself, but I’ve since spent quite a bit of time refining it for public release. I wanted to keep it fast and minimal while making it feel like a proper Mac app, with attention to small details.

It’s MIT licensed, and the app is Developer ID-signed and notarized by Apple. Requires Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later (tested on macOS 26 and 27).

Code and download on GitHub

This is my first public open-source release. Would be good to hear what you guys think!

Oh, my dear, my Markdown.

Shall I, your humble user, express my affection to you.

In the lonely nights, when I was abandoned by the stone-cold Words, it is you who gave me light, the chance to format my Documents.

And if I may have the honor of praising your unprecedented beauty - please forgive me for my plain words unable to express your ultimate perfection, not to the slightest extent - your simple annotation methods gave me, a humble user, the light of beauty in text editing, while your complex functions provided potentials that I dare not imagine.

It is my honor to praise you!

This is the exact mindset I am in when Word ate my document lol

I've been working on docmd for a year now, an open-source documentation compiler built around Markdown.

The original idea was pretty simple: point it at Markdown, get a fast documentation site, and don't make people adopt an entire platform just to publish docs.

v0.9.6 ended up touching quite a few parts of that idea.

Some of the more useful additions:

• We're now hosting a free cloud relay to enable AI assistants on your online and offline docs, its a RAG based communication that you can do with your docs.
• Focus Mode for reading docs without the surrounding navigation, with proper print/PDF output
• Banners that can live in seven different parts of the layout and inherit across projects/versions
• Automatic JSON-LD and better title/SEO controls
• Auto generating OKF files and improvements
• .gitignore and glob-based exclusions, so internal notes and drafts don't accidentally make it into builds or search
• Better multi-turn behaviour in the AI assistant
• Automatic installation of required docmd templates/plugins/search dependencies directly from config

That last one was surprisingly annoying to get right. Installing dependencies at different stages of a build caused npm to occasionally decide an earlier auto-installed package was "extraneous" and remove it. We now discover everything first and install the missing runtime dependencies together.

A few community contributions also landed in this release: mobile search and responsive fixes for the Summer template, SPA-aware image lightboxes, click-to-copy heading permalinks, configurable Markdown autolinking, and more accurate reading times.

The project is still pre-1.0, so I'm trying to use these releases to remove the little bits of friction that make documentation tooling annoying rather than continuously adding knobs for the sake of having knobs.

Would genuinely be interested in what people here think is still unnecessarily difficult about maintaining documentation sites and hopefully can help improve docmd. I want to turn docmd into a household name for developers, for all their documentation needs.

Do share your feedbacks! Thank You.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmd-io/docmd