Markdown Showdown: Two Great Note-Taking Tools

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:

• Typora
• Mark Text

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.
• Mark Text can export to HTML or PDF. Typora can export to those formats plus Word, OpenOffice, RTF, Epub, LaTeX, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, Textile, and OPML. Winner: Typora, though many of those formats are somewhat specialized. With Pandoc, you can convert from Markdown to a large number of formats anyway, so this isn’t a huge weakness for Mark Text.
• Both editors make it easy to create and edit tables. Tie.
• Both editors have a source-code mode, in case you want to see and edit the Markdown directly. Tie.
• Both editors let you export as PDF, and both offer themes for export. Typora offers more themes, and they’re the same themes that are available in the editor so you can see what your export will look like. I have to give the edge to Typora.
• Both editors offer Typewriter mode and Focus mode. Tie.
• Both editors provide an intuitive view of folders and files in the…