DEV Community: Aleksandr Netrebskii

Twelve Markdown editors in 2026, checked against their own release pages

Aleksandr Netrebskii — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:49:18 +0000

Disclosure: I work on Notula, which is the last of the twelve. Everything above it is about the category, and I have tried to be fair to the editors that beat us.

I went to write a comparison and found that almost every page ranking for "best markdown editor" is a small vendor's own blog with that vendor inside its own list. ShyEditor is first of twelve on shyeditor.com. mdclaudy is ninth of nine on mdclaudy.com. Nimbalyst is fifth of five on nimbalyst.com. None of them takes submissions, so there is no list to get onto - there are only lists people wrote.

So here is one more, with two rules. Every price, platform and release date below came off the project's own pages on 31 August 2026, not from another list. And I am last, and I say what is wrong with mine.

The row everybody has wrong

MarkText is described as unmaintained since March 2022 on essentially every one of those pages. Go and look at its releases: 0.19.1 shipped on 6 June 2025, and 0.20.0-rc.1 on 5 July 2025.

Nothing has shipped since, so the honest reading is neither "dead since 2022" nor "actively maintained". It is a project that came back once and then went quiet again. That matters if you are about to put a team on it, and it is the kind of thing that stays wrong for years once one list copies another.

Three questions before the list

Where do the files live? A folder you own, an app's own library, or somebody's server. This decides more than the interface does, and it is the one answer that is expensive to change later.

What do you look at while typing? WYSIWYG hides the syntax and shows you the document. Inline preview hides it everywhere except the line the cursor is on. Raw text with a preview pane shows you both. All three are defensible; they are not the same thing, and the pages that call all three WYSIWYG are why the term stopped meaning anything.

Does anybody else have to read it? Most of this list has no answer to that. Two of the browser tools have comments, one desktop editor does, and everything else assumes one person and one document.

The twelve

In no order.

Obsidian - best for a personal knowledge base. Free, no account, ordinary .md files in a folder you picked. Backlinks, a graph, and the largest plugin catalogue in the category. The editing surface is Live Preview, which is inline preview rather than WYSIWYG - you can see the syntax flicker back on the line the cursor is on. Sync is $4 a month, Publish $8, and there is a $50 commercial licence its own pricing page says you are not required to buy. If what you want is a place to think, stop reading here; nothing below is better at it.

Typora - best for one person writing prose. $14.99 once, up to three devices, fifteen-day trial, all three platforms. Typora established this way of working and is still the cleanest version of it. No collaboration of any kind and nothing resembling a comment. One writer, one file, and on that job it is very hard to beat for fifteen dollars.

VS Code - best when the Markdown is source. Free, and already open. Split preview. If the same repository holds the code, everybody touching the docs is a developer, and review already happens in a pull request, then adding an editor to that is a cost rather than a saving. The extensions advertising WYSIWYG either open a separate webview or hide the syntax only where the cursor is not.

iA Writer - best for drafting, and for typography. Pay once per platform, seven-day trial, Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad. The syntax stays visible on purpose - this is a text editor with opinions about type - and the opinions are good. It is also the only editor here with Authorship, which colours what you typed apart from what you pasted and what a model wrote. Whatever you think about AI in a draft, that is the one honest answer anybody has shipped to it.

Ulysses - best for long-form on Apple hardware. $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, no one-time option, Mac, iPad and iPhone. A library, a research pile and a pipeline that publishes straight to WordPress and Medium, rather than a window onto a folder.

Bear - best for quick notes on Apple hardware. $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The best-looking thing in this list by some distance, with a tag system that beats folders for the way most people actually file notes. It keeps notes in a library of its own and exports Markdown, which is the sentence to read twice before you put three years of work in it.

Zettlr - best for academic writing. Free and open source, all three platforms. First-class Zotero and JabRef support, over nine thousand citation styles, Pandoc underneath, export profiles aimed at journal submission. Nothing else here is close on that job.

MarkText - best free WYSIWYG. Free, MIT, the closest free equivalent to Typora. See the section above before you commit a team to it.

Ghostwriter - best free editor on Windows and Linux. Free, GPL, a KDE project. Raw Markdown with a live preview pane, a focus mode that dims everything but the current sentence, and a Hemingway mode that turns off the backspace key. It is not trying to be WYSIWYG and does not pretend to be, which on this subject counts as a virtue.

StackEdit - best scratchpad in a browser. Free, open source, nothing to install, syncs to Drive and Dropbox. It holds position one on Google for the whole category on about four hundred words of copy, which says more about the result page than about the editor - but for pasting something in and seeing how it renders, it is still the fastest answer there is.

HackMD - best for a team drafting in a browser. The free tier carries in-line and page comments, three invitees and twenty GitHub pushes a month; Prime is $5 a seat. Real-time co-editing, and the document syncs to a repository. The trade is which direction it syncs: the document lives on their server and visits your repo, so the comments, the history and the access list are theirs rather than yours.

Notula - the one I make. Free, no account, no server, macOS and Windows. It opens a git repository as a tree of documents rather than a list of files, hides the syntax everywhere including the line the cursor is on, edits a pipe table as a table and draws a Mermaid block as a diagram in the document. The part nothing else here has: select a passage, leave a comment, get a reply, resolve it - and the thread is committed beside the document as a plain file, so it arrives with a clone, works offline and outlives any account. On the question that decides whether a WYSIWYG editor is usable in a repository at all, the round trip is byte-identical across six thousand real documents and a one-word edit leaves 96.4% of blocks untouched. What is wrong with it: it is closed source, there is no Linux build yet, everybody who comments needs the repository and a desktop, and the builds are not code-signed yet, so macOS quarantines the download and Windows shows a SmartScreen warning the first time.

The same twelve in a table

Editor	Editing surface	Runs on	Price	Your files
Obsidian	Inline preview	Desktop and mobile	Free	Plain .md in a folder
Typora	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows, Linux	$14.99 once	Plain .md in a folder
VS Code	Split preview	macOS, Windows, Linux	Free	Plain .md in a folder
iA Writer	Raw text, styled	macOS, Windows, iOS	Once, per platform	Plain .md in a folder
Ulysses	Raw text, styled	macOS, iPadOS, iOS	$39.99 a year	Its own library
Bear	Inline preview	macOS, iPadOS, iOS	$29.99 a year	Its own library
Zettlr	Inline preview	macOS, Windows, Linux	Free, open source	Plain .md in a folder
MarkText	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows, Linux	Free, MIT	Plain .md in a folder
Ghostwriter	Raw text and preview	Windows, Linux, macOS	Free, GPL	Plain .md in a folder
StackEdit	Live preview	Browser	Free, open source	Browser and cloud storage
HackMD	Live preview	Browser	Free tier, $5 a seat	Their server, synced to git
Notula	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows	Free	Plain .md in your git repo

The last column is the one no competing list carries, and it is the one that is expensive to get wrong. Two of these keep your writing in a library of their own, and one keeps it on a server you do not run.

If the docs are already in a git repository

That is the case this list is thin on. The documentation sits in the repo beside the code, which is the right place for it - and then the people who have to read it, the PM and the support lead and the person who actually knows whether the sentence is true, are outside the repo looking in. That gap is why I built Notula, and it is the only claim I would make for it.

Which Markdown editor to choose

Aleksandr Netrebskii — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:23:38 +0000

Disclosure: I work on Notula, which is the last section of this article. Everything before it is about the category.

A WYSIWYG Markdown editor hides the syntax. Live preview shows it twice, and most of the tools called WYSIWYG are the second kind. The difference is small when you are checking how something renders, and large when you are writing.

What it means

A WYSIWYG Markdown editor shows you the formatted document while you type, instead of the syntax that produces it. No hashes in front of headings, no asterisks around bold, no pipes in tables. You see a heading, and the file on disk contains ## Heading.

WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get", which came from word processors in the 1980s and means something more specific here: the editing surface and the rendered document are the same surface. There is no second pane, and there is no moment where you are looking at the raw text.

The distinction the term rests on

The alternative is live preview: raw Markdown in one pane, the rendering in another, scrolling together.

StackEdit, Dillinger and Markdown Live Preview are all live preview, and all three are good at it. They open in a browser, they need no install, they sync to Drive and Dropbox, and for pasting something in and seeing how it renders they are hard to beat. If that is what you came for, use one of them and stop reading.

The difference matters when you are writing rather than checking. In a live preview editor you are always reading the version with the syntax in it, because that is the pane your cursor is in. The rendering is a reference. In a WYSIWYG editor there is no such pane, so a table looks like a table while you edit it and a heading looks like a heading.

There is a third thing worth naming, because it gets called WYSIWYG and is not quite: inline preview, where the syntax is hidden except on the line the cursor is on. It is much closer, and the flicker on the current line is the tell.

Which editors are which

Genuinely WYSIWYG. Typora is the one that established this way of working and is still the cleanest version of it, for a single person writing prose. MarkText is the open-source answer to it and is free.

Inline preview, usually called WYSIWYG. Obsidian's Live Preview mode hides the syntax except where the cursor is. Obsidian is a far better personal knowledge base than anything else on this page, with backlinks, a graph and years of plugins, and if that is what you need the question of what its editor is called does not matter much.

Live preview. StackEdit, Dillinger, Markdown Live Preview, HackMD, and VS Code with its preview pane open. Toast UI Editor ships both modes and lets you switch.

Not a Markdown editor at all, although it turns up here: Quill and similar rich-text libraries are components for building an editor into your own application, and they produce HTML rather than Markdown.

Editor	Editing surface	Runs on	Price	Comments on a passage
Typora	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows, Linux	$14.99	No
MarkText	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows, Linux	Free, MIT	No
Obsidian	Inline preview	Desktop and mobile	Free	No
StackEdit	Live preview	Browser	Free, open source	Yes, into the file
Dillinger	Live preview	Browser	Free, open source	No
HackMD	Live preview	Browser	Free tier	Yes, on their server
VS Code	Split preview	macOS, Windows, Linux	Free	Only in a pull request
Notula	WYSIWYG	macOS, Windows	Free	Yes, beside the file

Checked against each project's own pages on 19 August 2026. The last column is the one Notula was built for, which is why it is filled in honestly for everybody else: StackEdit and HackMD both have comments, and the two editors that match us on editing surface have none.

What is still hard, even in a WYSIWYG editor

Hiding the syntax solves the easy half. Three things stay hard, and they are worth checking before you pick.

Tables

A pipe table is the single most unpleasant thing to edit by hand in Markdown, and it is where a WYSIWYG editor earns its place: adding a column should be adding a column. Check that the file it writes back is still an ordinary table and not something only that editor can read.

Diagrams

A mermaid code block is a wall of arrows and brackets in every editor that treats it as code. Drawing it in the document is a different experience from previewing it beside the document.

The diff

This is the one nobody checks and the one that causes arguments. An editor that hides the syntax still has to write the syntax back, and many of them reformat the whole file to do it: every line rewrapped, every table realigned, and a one-word change arriving as a two-hundred-line diff that nobody can review. If the files are in git, ask this question first.

Questions people search for alongside this one

Is there a WYSIWYG Markdown editor for VS Code?

Not really. VS Code renders Markdown in a preview pane beside the file, and the extensions that advertise WYSIWYG either open a separate webview or hide the syntax only on the lines your cursor is not on. The editing surface is still the raw text, which is what makes VS Code excellent for a file you are treating as source and awkward for a document you are treating as writing.

Which WYSIWYG Markdown editors are free?

MarkText is free and MIT-licensed, and it is the closest free equivalent to Typora, which costs $14.99 after a fifteen-day trial. Obsidian is free, and its editor is inline preview rather than WYSIWYG. Notula is free with no account. Between them that is most of the category: there are very few paid products in this space.

Is Obsidian a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?

Not exactly. Obsidian's Live Preview hides the syntax everywhere except the line the cursor is on, which is inline preview - much closer to WYSIWYG than a split pane, and recognisable by the flicker as the caret moves through a heading. Obsidian is also a far better personal knowledge base than anything else on this page, and if that is what you want, what its editor is called does not matter much.

Does a WYSIWYG editor change my Markdown file?

Some of them do. Hiding the syntax means writing the syntax back on save, and many editors reformat the whole file to do it - rewrapping every line, realigning every table - so a one-word change arrives as a diff nobody can review. If your files are in git, ask this before you ask anything about the interface.

Where Notula fits

Notula is a real WYSIWYG editor, and besides that a git-integrated collaborative tool: comments and notifications, as you do in Google Docs.

It is for docs as code - the documentation that already lives in a git repository. No syntax on screen at any point, the cursor line included, with tables you edit as tables and Mermaid diagrams drawn in the document. It opens the repository as a tree of documents rather than a list of files, and it adds the thing none of the editors above have: comment threads on a passage, with replies and resolve, committed beside the document rather than written into it.

On the diff question, since it is the one that matters in a repository: the round trip is byte-identical across 6,000 real documents, and an edit leaves 96.4% of blocks untouched.

It is closed source, it is macOS and Windows with Linux still to come, and everyone who comments needs the repository and a desktop. If those are fine, it is free.