Markdown Showdown: Two Great Note-Taking Tools

Peter Conrad
3 min readFeb 24, 2022
Decision flow chart

If you aren’t using Markdown to take notes, you’re missing out. Because Markdown uses text symbols to indicate formatting, you don’t have to use menus or complicated shortcuts to format your text. That makes it possible to take beautiful notes very quickly.

There are many Markdown editors, including some specifically designed for taking notes. Most provide an editing window full of Markdown code and a separate preview window that shows the formatted text. Only a small handful are WYSIWYG editors—that is, they provide a single pane that lets you edit formatted text directly.

A WYSIWYG Markdown editor gives you all the advantages of Markdown with all the convenience of your favorite content editing tool. In particular, two editors shine:

Both have attractive, easy user interfaces. Both make it simple to organize your content in folders. Both provide auto-save options, meaning you can take notes by just typing what you want, without worrying about which files you’ve saved. But which is better?

  • Mark Text and Typora both work on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Tie.
  • Typora is a paid app ($14.99 as of this writing), while Mark Text is free and open-source. Winner: Mark Text.

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Peter Conrad
Peter Conrad

Written by Peter Conrad

Peter Conrad is a writer and artist with a penchant for grammar and a knack for the technical. See his latest at patreon.com/stymied or vidriocafe.com

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