What are the best developer tools built around Markdown?

I started typing Obsidian and then finished reading the question, haha.

Charm Bracelet's glow is another one worth having in your toolbox. Pipe anything to it and return gorgeous ansi colored display.

Markdown is simple enough that the original implementations came with html renders. Today some of the valuable contributions are how they provide syntax highlighting. I am curious as to people's favorite tools for SSR syntax highlighting/styling. I have used a few but none that I could recommend.

https://github.com/tobi/qmd. cli for vector search across your own markdown to docs. Tracking current sota approaches. I've enjoyed it.

I'm particularly fond of presenterm. It's a terminal based slide show utility that uses markdown for writing the slide content.

Yeah, Obsidian is pretty neat. I used Emacs org-roam before migrating to Obsidian, and the UX differences meant I've written thousands of notes since migrating, compared to a few dozen back when I was using org-mode.

Here are some other tools based on Markdown I've used:

• Quarto/R-markdown: pretty neat literate programming tool based on markdown. Unlike Jupyter notebook, it's purely plaintext, and unlike org-mode, it's not tied to Emacs.
• MDX: Add js components in markdown. Not just React, but also supported by other js frameworks and things like Astro. I am using it in my website for richer contents
• MyST: reStructuredText in markdown syntax

I've heard but never used:

• Markdeep

Unfortunately, the fundamental limitation of markdown means almost all of the above options become mutually exclusive dialects. I wonder what the landscape would look like if other markup languages like org-mode or reStructuredText gained the prominence that markdown has.

Entangled! It allows bi-directional literate programming in Markdown. I use it all the time when writing programs.

I've also been writing a Rust implementation called ReTangled.

Moment is a new one that's doing some interesting things (full disclosure, I contracted with them to work on their collaboration and rich text editing). Documents are all saved to disk as markdown (and they care a lot about offline/local-first software and git-based version control), but are also programmable and reactive. They've put quite a lot of thought into balancing portability and interactive features. Their interactive blog posts are all written with Moment, as an example of some interesting things you can do with the tool.

Most of the developers tool are wrappers around unified. https://unifiedjs.com/

Mdx is one of them and is the plugin entry of most of the bundlers.

Not sure if your question is about library or end user application…

Logseq is very similar to Obsidian, but it enforces an "every file is a graph" model, which in markdown looks like a top level unordered list, which in turn contains more nested unordered lists.

Short excerpt from my "wikidata.md":

- Reverse lookup
  - https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?q=Q111181355
- SPARQL Editor
  - Ctrl-Space alternative is Alt-Enter
  - https://query.wikidata.org/
  - [Query builder](https://query.wikidata.org/querybuilder/?uselang=en)
  - https://dbpedia.org/sparql
- SPARQL
  - BGP -> Basic Graph Pattern
  - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_tutorial

Somehow this model just makes sense to me.

And on top of that they built spaced repetition, where a list node with a #card in it is the prompt, and child lists for that node are the "answer", with metadata stored in-line.

Short excerpt from what used to be my "gregg.md":

- Alphabet forward cards
  - What is Gregg Simplified for "N" (description)? #card
    card-last-interval:: 15.0
    card-repeats:: 4
    card-ease-factor:: 1.0
    card-next-schedule:: 2025-08-12T09:03:05.489Z
    card-last-reviewed:: 2025-07-04T09:03:05.489Z
    card-last-score:: 1
    - forward short stroke
  - What is Gregg Simplified for "M" (description)? #card
    card-last-interval:: 15.0
    card-repeats:: 4
    card-ease-factor:: 1.0
    card-next-schedule:: 2025-08-12T09:03:05.489Z
    card-last-reviewed:: 2025-07-04T09:03:05.489Z
    card-last-score:: 1
    - forward long stroke

Logseq UI hides the metadata, but normal text editors like vim struggle with this, as hiding and unhiding the lines gets very "jumpy" as you scan through a file.

I built a CLI tool that works with the Logseq card format - losrs, but also supports a different representation, specifically one where metadata is moved into a separate jsonlines file and the #card list item is modified to have a "card serial number".

Short excerpt from "orthic.md":

- What is Orthic for "o"? #card <!-- CSN:1337 -->
  - long -
- What is Orthic for "m"? #card <!-- CSN:1340 -->
  - long ◠

Since the serial number is a short comment, vim has no problem hiding/unhiding it as you scan through a file.

Two of mine: submark is a small CLI (and a GHA action) that pulls a section out of a Markdown file by heading. Main use case is CI: grab the ## Version 1.2.3 block from CHANGELOG.md at tag time and feed it to GitHub Releases as the body.

Also mine, though a different kind of tool: Hongdown, an opinionated Markdown formatter (think Prettier for Markdown).

I can recommend silverbullet: https://silverbullet.md/, kind of a web based obsidian. I've been using it since a very early stage. It has a very powerful plugin engine and IIRC the latest version has no state on the server except for the plain markdown files. The PWA is designed to work offline, so you get both shared notes across everywhere and offline access.