What text editor (cli or gui) are you using for writing non-code?
50 points by oceanhaiyang
50 points by oceanhaiyang
Papers, books, and notes.
I’ve being using Trilium (not Next) but find writing simple markdown notes very enjoyable in CLI. Been trying Nano and now micro recently, both enjoyable.
Emacs, of course.
I'm working on a new version of Emacs called DREI. It's specifically designed for WYSIWYG editing of HTML+CSS documents. It has many of the best features of Emacs for text editing, but renders HTML+CSS using a browser with a Tauri wrapper. I have a long way to go until it's more than a hobby project, but I already find it better than editing raw HTML, Markdown, or Org mode when I'm writing blog posts.
Obsidian, because it works really well. My notes are synced everywhere, the mobile app is very usable.
When writing in English, the only language I know that uses the Latin alphabet, I use Neovim. But when writing in Korean (my native language) or Japanese, which don't use the Latin alphabet, I use a Markdown editor app called Apostrophe. Typing CJK characters in a modal editor is a real pain.
Why is it the case? I only know languages that use latin alphabet, so can't even imagine.
What makes it awkward for me is juggling the editor's mode and the input method's mode at the same time. I leave insert mode, forget what state the input method is in, jump back, and now my keystrokes do the wrong thing.
With Chinese or Japanese input methods, I find it worse. You usually type a reading first, then convert and confirm the character you want, so there's this extra preedit state sitting in the middle. In a modal editor, that means keeping track of what Vim is doing and what the input method is doing, and by then I've usually lost the sentence.
Korean is less bad for me because hangul composes as I type, so there's no separate conversion step. Even then, the editor/input method switching is awkward enough that I'd rather write CJK text somewhere else.
I find that the Emacs package (I know, I know, this is Vim thread) smart-input-source handles this really well specifically for modal editing; maybe this could be the basis for someone to write a (n)vim package. Bonus points for using the OS native IME.
This has always felt like a limitation of TUI editors rather than modal editors of their own.
Having a real GUI splits keyboard events into key presses and text inputs, so you can use key presses for keybindings and text inputs for... well, text input, in INSERT mode, or something like that.
I dualwield Latin and Cyrillic, and I'd be rich if I got a penny every time I tried to do something in normal mode only for nothing to happen because I was on the wrong layout. If there was a way to bind to layout-independent scancodes instead of sequences of characters, things would be much better. Alas, modal editors are yet to catch up to the fact that ASCII is not a fact of life for most of the world.
So I can't speak for Korean, only Japanese, but the way you type Japanese is that you use a program called an IME to create the characters by spelling them out. That is you don't have a list or keyboard of X thousand kanji, instead if you want to type out 今日 you spell it out as きょう/kyou and then select 今日 from a little popup with tab or enter. The problem is that a lot of apps not designed for CJK are listening for key down events rather than input events and so will react to the steps you're performing prematurely. In addition mixing Latin and CJK characters in one input is a pain because you need to keep toggling IME modes.
For example, if you want to replace 今日 (kyou/today) by 明日 (ashita/tomorrow) in vim-like bindings you'll type e.g.
<Disable IME shortcut>:s/<enable IME>kyou<enter><disable IME>/<enable IME>ashita<enter><disable IME>/g
So that has two problems - one that's a lot of steps toggling your IME, and secondly when you hit that first enter, depending on the programs implementation it might confirm your IME selection all right, but also immediately trigger execution of the command. It's not just vim-alikes that get this wrong, the time tracking app I use also interprets confirming a selection as submitting a time period.
I use Helix for all my text editing needs, code or otherwise.
For notes I like to write simple markdown notes in ~/Notes.
On the occasion I have to write something with more formatting requirements, I like Typst.
I now take all my notes using Helix on my laptop and it’s such a joy. On my phone I use Obsidian, and I synchronize the two with syncthing. I also back up my files from my laptop with Pika Backup.
In Helix I’m using harper-ls, marksman and rumdl respectively for grammar, path completion (e.g. when embedding images), and markdown formatting.
I wrote about how I use Helix with markdown here https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/10/29-vscode-to-helix/
Switched to Helix couple months back and haven't looked back.
It’s great and batteries included. I’ve been waiting for the plugin system to be done to switch permanently. Speaking of…i should check the status of it again. There are a handful of things i have in my workflow in other editors it doesn’t do and it would be great if it did.
Vim. I use vim for everything, except web site text fields, which cause me to swear.
Don't forget to do vim keybindings in your shell, kids! Tell your parents to set -o vi
I toss in goyo.vim for when I’m writing prose.
There's a similar plugin called zen-mode.nvim for neovim, which has a few more bells and whistles like tmux handling and Wezterm support.
In-terminal, I use kakoune or vim, not too heavily customized. For long-form markdown, or editing my personal wiki, I use sublime text.
Historically I've been a Vim person, but started using Emacs+Evil mode when I started my current job because some of our tooling is Emacs-specific. (Long story.) I tried for a few weeks to acclimate to Emacs keybindings for movement, editing text, etc. and just couldn't do it. Emacs + Evil means that I don't have to fight 25 years of muscle memory.
I have learned to love Org mode so that's something.
Org mode changes a man. I have a colleague who codes in vim but uses Emacs & Org mode for note-taking.
Magit is another package people end up picking up Emacs for.
That is verbatim what I do. I've tried several times to move fully into emacs, but I've never found anything as flexible as my tmux/vim workflow.
Do you have any experience using nvim-orgmode? It's a little weird for me to try to learn org, and I don't know whether it's org and its emacs-y-ness, or the way the nvim clone is implemented.
You can try it if you don’t know emacs but Intried it after using emacs for quite some time and it didn’t „click“ for me. It doesn’t feel as good and I have various capture templates now that are hard to replicate in neovim-orgmode.
Since the clone also supports capture templates: how much logic do you use in your templates, or why are neovim's inadequate?
It's really hard for me to really grasp how to view orgmode. But I don't think it makes sense for me to learn emacs just to learn org once and then forget about it, but from where I am now I don't exactly know what I'm missing.
From what I can gather from reading docs and tutorials and "how I use org" blogs, it's a relatively syntax-light markup language with a handful of shortcuts that make editing and searching and general management of org syntax blocks easier. It somehow feels – at the same time – more and less structured than something like, e.g., a VimWiki.
Same boat except the emacs-specific tooling. I came for Org-mode and stayed because of Evil instead.
I am a vi/vim person, but org mode is one of the main reasons I also have fluency of emacs, lol.
I use joe and have been since the mid-90s.
Hah, in University someone asked one of our teachers about editors and she said "joe, of course". I started using it as my terminal text editor for everything except coding for ages, esp. on remote systems where I could install it.
Actually, I just checked my previous infrastructure as code repository, and the first commit in 2013 actually just installed joe! But I suspect precisely infrastructure as code was why I no longer used joe so much. I think I was using Eclipse at the time for coding (even though I was doing Python).
I think at some point I switched to VS Code and then to Emacs, as I was too "content" with an editor that I felt was pretty good and only annoyed me on "principles".
(Also, IIRC, RHEL used to include joe in their main repos, but at some point it fell to EPEL?)
Thanks for the fond memories you brought by mentioning this little editor that I heard about basically accidentally and then maybe used for more than a decade. I miss it.
Still Helix.
I do like writing long-form stories in Wordgrinder though, or did when I wrote that more often. It's soothingly bare-bones.
Helix
How do you deal with spell checking, etc in helix?
I love helix for writing and found myself wanting spell checking and a few other things as a second step-- I write without editing, and then use https://codeberg.org/jpt/owl-write to do some "linting". An LSP can work too, but I found I prefer it to be a separate process.
I use https://vale.sh/ for technical documentation and for random stuff: https://github.com/Automattic/harper
I don't really have a good solution yet for multi-language checks.
i have been using the codebook LSP for spell check. works much better than most spell checkers i encounter!
Emacs and obsidian; recognizing that obsidian isn't OSS, but logseq didn't click with me, and the new CLI is pretty great for adding to scripts; eg, a little zsh function that I use to take one-off reminders or pipe things out of when needed:
obs () {
local text="$*"
if [[ -z "$text" ]]
then
echo "Usage: obs <text to append>"
return 1
fi
if [[ "-" == "$text" ]]
then
text=$(cat)
fi
local timestamp
timestamp=$(date +"%m/%d %H:%M")
local entry="- ${timestamp} -- ${text}"
obsidian daily:append content="$entry"
}
recognizing that obsidian isn't OSS, but logseq didn't click with me
Obsidian is a lot more polished than Logseq, but also, Obsidian and Logseq are very different tools. Logseq feels more like an outliner or a mind-mapping tool, where you're encouraged to divide your notes into a deeply nested tree structure, each node being somewhere between a sentence fragment and a paragraph. You can write longer nodes. But Logseq really wants you to build a tree, whereas Obsidian wants you to write flat pages.
The practical difference is I don't feel compelled to format my notes into prose, which is sometimes quicker and easier. The downside is I feel compelled to format my notes into lists, and it's harder (for me at least) to take stream-of-consciousness notes and tidy them up later.
Between the two, I maybe have a mild preference for Obsidian, but it's a wash.
Check out org roam
org-roam never clicked for me. I settled on Denote as a lighter weight and (to me) more flexible alternative.
Yeah Denote is nice. I've been using org-roam for almost 7 years now and am feeling enticed by Denote mostly due to the SQLite dependency which makes it complicated to build tools for (e.g. I have always really wanted a way to edit my org roam files on mobile that doesn't suck)
and now that I'm thinking about it, these are essential for me reading and taking notes for personal study:
I haven't really gone down the route of pdf viewing in Obsidian for two main reasons I think: I want to eventually move to (or at least be open to) a non-Obsidian editor, and also I find that Zotero is a generally better setup for documents. It is appealing to put it all together into one spot and one app, but I'm still at a place right now where I find that different tools have different strengths and some activities are better suited to be separated and not mashed together into a single unified system/interface.
n/vim. goyo + pencil is a good time.
https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim
https://github.com/preservim/vim-pencil
typically if you're writing markdown you can gO to open headings in a jump list for quick navigation.
for typesetting, i've never learned latex and am not really interested in it. markdown + pandoc is good enough for 90% of my use cases. otherwise i'll use groff. or, lately, typst.
This is my setup too. I have it set up to use pencil soft-wrap and to swap the bindings of j with gj and k with gk so that I can navigate the cursor through paragraphs naturally.
vis
Aha! Another vis user!
What is vis? I tried searching for it but didn't find anything that was obviously a text editor/note taker.
I think the people above might be referring to this: https://github.com/martanne/vis, it's an original implementation of a modal editor, similar to vi/vim that uses sam's regex system.
sam's regex is far far better than ed's. It's really not close at all. I wish I could get neovim to support it cleanly, but it's just not really possible.
For content where writing is the most important part, I use Typora (scroll down the page, it's not super obvious).
I love Typora and use it for almost everything that isn’t code. Type in markdown and out pops nicely rendered text. Drag and drop images into it. Inline diagrams. What’s not to love? :)
I use Typora quite a lot when I’m editing Markdown. It is very nice, but the rendered mode can be buggy. Unfortunately, their comms on open issues is close to non-existant. The developer doesn’t communicate with users, leading to threads full of people wondering what’s happening. Not great.
Oh, that’s sad. I’ve asked a couple of questions to the support email address and received he,Paul (if terse) responses. I hope they keep developing it.
Hi! Making small text editors is a thing I do for fun and living so my answer might be a bit off piste but I hope it won’t come across as disingenuous:
I use Ensō which I made for myself a few years back. I’ve been using it daily since 2019. A bunch of people used the free version and a few thousand even paid for it to support me.
Usage ranges from video scripts and blogposts to poetry and musicals about squirrels.
How people use it: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/how-people-use-enso/
Ensō: https://enso.sonnet.io
(Otherwise I just open nvim or obsidian nowadays)
For notes: Google Keep. It's not amazing [1], but it's free, and I like the mobile app: the best software is the one you have with you, etc.
It fulfills the need for when I'm away from a keyboard, and all I want is a virtual scrap of paper; I can just toss a new note on the pile, find it with full-text search later, and that whole flow is frictionless. If I need features beyond text entry, the Obsidian app is a better fit. But often when using Obsidian, I feel compelled to organize and curate my notes, and that's a distraction if all I want in the moment is a persistent, nameless textarea.
(If you're designing a note-taking app, please, make it frictionless to create new notes! Obsidian fails here because I don't always want to title my note, or maybe the first title that comes to mind has a forbidden character. Being able to create a new note without thinking about its path in the filesystem is the #1 reason I keep going back to Google Keep. This sounds like a small thing, I know. "Why not just accept 'Untitled 123' as the title?" But my perfectionist, improperly-caffeinated squirrel brain insists otherwise.)
[1] It's not open source, which bothers me. Also, it's a Google product that's more than a few years old. For a period of time a couple months ago, newlines stopped syncing correctly between mobile and web, and I thought, "Oh no, Google's about to ax this product, huh?" It's been syncing better recently, but it got me spooked.
For notes I use org-roam and therefore emacs. When I write something else then usually neovim.
Sublime for text (it's speed and ability to handle huge files is still amazing).
Logseq for notes. It's like an open-source Roam/Obsidian, however it's been stagnant while they work on a massive 2.0 update for a long, long time now. Not sure I'd choose it again, but the files are fundamentally markdown, so it's easy to switch.
iA writer is incredible and completely worth the high cost. I write more when I have access to iA writer, and that makes it worth it for me.
Sometimes I'll break out Texifier for docs that need specific formatting or Craft for more complex documents that need sharing with others.
Doom Emacs, just like for code.
For random notes at work, I keep a little window on my desktop (not in the terminal where I do coding, because those are remote). And for writing long-form text, I use darkroom-mode and a larger font for extra focus.
I've been using Obsidian for personal notes and writings, and have really enjoyed it! For blog posts I tend to write them directly in VSCode so I can preview them directly on my website.
I abandonned the dichotomy for code/non-code when I trully started to embrase Vim. I even ditched the distraction-free plugin I was using.
I just write Vim, also for my emails and writing everywhere else (such as in this text box) becomes a chore
Other than code I write plain text (emails) or Markdown (everything else), in Neovim. I make sure to save all my notes, design docs, TODOs etc. in ~/ and then spend 30 minutes every time trying to find that design doc I started a week ago.. (really need a solution here..)
Datestamps on your filenames works for me, it's how I started keeping track of papers in high school.
2026-04-07-myfile.txt
or,
myfile-2026-04-07.txt
acme (from plan9port)
Especially with prose, the mouse-chording is useful to just "pick up" and "drop" text when reorganizing ideas, I can make more windows with a click, then select and pipe text to any other tool I need or can imagine and write. I'll also set up Watch helper programs that will render markdown to HTML and refresh it in the browser or whatever like a makeshift Obsidian.
These things are useful for code too, but text and ideas move around more when I'm writing prose or notes or outlines.
I do use vim to similar effect (and at times sam or ed if I need to jot out some text fast or do a really quick get in / get out spot-edit).
OneNote. It’s nice that I can paste in images and sync to mobile, and I use the built in checklists heavily. I don’t expect anyone here to be inspired to join me. :)
OneNote is quite nice. I have a surface pro 3 and can hand write my notes. It detects and types them if I want. I don’t use it anymore but the quality is nice!
BBEdit. I don't do much programming, but I do work on my site a bit and I write articles in markdown. I am a huge fan of Emacs, but it's an endless time suck of customization.
Pages for stuff like my resume and cover letter because editing LaTeX is not my idea of a good time.
I find myself using mousepad (previously leafpad) a lot. Especially for somewhat temporary notes. No particular reason for that. When I still used KDE Kate fulfilled the same job.
you might enjoy typst, if the idea of having a “resume as code” is more interesting without latex in the picture. I switched from pages to typst for my resume and love it.
Sublime, but I mostly still write code. I never tried this setup for writing https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime-writer/ but looks promising.
i use Obsidian for all my math notes. Obsidian gives me access to LaTeX when i want it and i like being able to tag my math notes. it's pretty good, could be better.
i use Zed for all my other notes which are in Markdown.
Libreoffice writer for prose, my blog website's CMS for blog posts, and my code text editor for everything else.
I use Helix (heavily modified -- patched to start in insert mode), just because it's convenient and I'm frequently in the terminal and it's my default terminal editor. (I'd rather use terminal Emacs personally, but hit a hell bug and haven't gone back. Having language support that Just Works is nice, too.)
I've used both ghostwriter (KDE) and Apostrophe (GNOME) in the past for writing Markdown and found them lovely to interact with, if a little unstable. Unfortunately, some GNOME library updated and broke every single gtk4 / libadwaita app on my system (KDE) a while ago -- now they're completely translucent, and I haven't yet been able to track down why, so I can no longer use Apostrophe. Probably an intentional breaking of custom themes, not sure. ghostwriter still works and is lovely.
I also used to use Obsidian for writing and managing my wiki, as it's all Markdown... but recently, I've stopped using that, too, as I've gotten really into Typst. It's such crazy good software. It has completely replaced LaTeX for me -- enough linguistics packages exist that I can use it for all my work, and the collaboration features are way better than Overleaf, even on the free plan... (infinite collaborators! read/write/view-only links! editing without an account! instant compilation! big improvement over getting timed out after the third TikZ diagram / syntax tree)
There aren't really any Typst-specific editors yet, so I've been either writing in Helix (which has builtin support thanks to bundling LSPs + tree-sitter grammars for every language, so it's fairly nice) or more commonly, the web app. The web app can get kind of slow sometimes (after ~3000 lines or so) and it's a bit funny to use it when I don't need any collaboration features, just a rendering preview, but it works really well. And I'm mostly writing, anyway, not manipulating code, so I don't mind not having all the editor shortcuts I'm used to.
(Typst also replaced the Markdown + LaTeX code blocks amalgamations I used to write ==> generate to a PDF with pandoc + pandoc-ext. Worked great, but I'm glad that I need it no longer.)
I tired a series of editors for long form writing, but settled on a VS Code profile with a different theme and plugin set to my dev profile. Zen mode works a treat.
I have been using Notion as our family wiki for the last few years and that is where I write my articles. After moving my personal site to Hugo I am writing posts straight into IntelliJ IDEA though this has the issue of drafts not being available when I am away from my computer.
vim for the past 10 years in text files or whatever markup lang is required
Don't know if I recommend it anymore, some people really love/need their WYSIWYG editors and wouldn't wanna take that away from anyone. I find great benefit but it was at a cost as all things are. but now the custom tools in my vim are so sick and I use them with ease.
I mostly use Emacs, because I like writing in structured text (org-mode). But I do sometimes look longingly at IA Writer, because it is just a nicer writing environment. I wish it has org support.
I'm using my custom more-vim-than-vim editor inside emacs: composiphrase! I wrote the first version and a bunch of blog posts about it around a year ago. Recently I've picked up working on it and have been making some big improvements, and I'll probably make a more proper “release” in coming months with a demo video. As it is currently, the overall documentation is a bit out of date.
The key idea of the editor is much more composition -- like with vim you can compose an operation like delete with a movement that is based on some text object, except composiphrase decomposes concepts more, allowing them to be re-composed more flexibly. Key bindings end up being longer, eg. 2 keys for most motions (with 1-key repeat), 2 keys for choosing most of the operators, new keys that you can put in for modifiers. But because it's compositional, learning a few small pieces gives multiplicative power. Because I know the key bindings for the concepts of “copy”, “forward”, “end”, “url”, I can copy forward to the end of a url, for example, which no editor would normally include a key binding for. It has an order of magnitude more of each of verbs, objects, and modifiers, compared to vim (or emacs evil-mode), so it unlocks a lot of operations at your fingertips with a small amount of learning. It brings some lisp editing concepts, like slurping and barfing, to other tree-shaped objects (eg. org-mode outlines, markdown headings and lists, indentation trees).
When I first made it, I noticed that I ended up using outline (eg. org-mode) text objects more than almost anything else, since I take all of my notes and to-do lists in org-mode. I've been beefing up support for more prose-writing objects lately, like markdown lists and tables, so the same key bindings I use with other objects can let me do things like insert or transpose table columns, just by changing the object target. I think it's a real game changer to have structured editing and movement commands that work on a wide variety of objects, but where you learn a small set of composable key commands once and then suddently you know how to do hundreds of commands you would otherwise never bother to learn. Transpose markdown section backward? Select camelCaseSubWord? Open new org-mode heading below the current that is a sibling, child, or uncle to the current heading (by adding up/down modifiers)? Toggle case to the end of the git change hunk? (Ok, now I'm just being silly.)
Anyway, when I was first doing it I was focused more on code editing, but as it stands I still haven't polished the treesitter integration and I'm putting more effort into more text objects that I want to use in markdown and org-mode, and I use sentence- and paragraph-based motion a lot more than I originally expected. But since I often am writing about code, it is nice to also have text objects for things like symbols, code blocks, s-expressions, etc when I'm writing in org-mode or markdown.
Sorry for the long comment about my personal project, but it's relevant and I want to talk about it.
my standard helix if i happen to be right there in a terminal, otherwise good old gnome text editor. exactly zero (0) frills.
Pages if I'm writing a PDF document. MarkRight if I need to put together a non-trivial markdown.
I use physical paper for a few journaling things. It's a lot quicker to pull out a notebook and jot something in pen (and to have the option of making a diagram) than it is to pull out a phone, authenticate, open an app, wait for it to load, and then navigate to where I want the note.
I always carry (1) a Field Notes notebook for a quick bullet journal and (2) a Muji A6 Slim notebook in a bag. I also carry a (3) Muji A5 dot-grid "higher quality" notebook for ideas, notes, etc. as well as a (4) Muji A5 dot-grid "lower quality" notebook for scrap paper, etc. When I get to the end of the notebook, I replace it with a new one, and I store it with a date range label. (No specific reason to go with Muji, and they've stopped selling the A5 notebook.)
It might sound like overdo, but it isn't much to carry, and I'm not spending much time organizing at all (I replace a notebook once every few months). It's simple and works well.
For text editing in the terminal (which I find myself doing often), I used to use micro on servers, until I moved to helix. Vim never clicked for me, but Helix was very approachable. It has mouse support :D
For everything else, I'm a big fan of Obsidian. I've been using Markdown and LaTeX notes for awhile, moving from text files to Overleaf and StackEdit, to then Nextcloud Notes. It was a lot to keep up with, until I started using Obsidian in 2022. I even write some code in Obsidian out of convenience (mostly the occasional template scripts).
Using Markdown has paid off very well, since I get to keep all my notes from when I was on other Markdown note editors :)
tldr: Physical paper, Helix for terminal text editing, Obsidian for a notebook I keep on every app.
Apple Notes, moving to Standard Notes to add Linux & Android support, and then Obsidian for anything non-ephemeral.
Just Emacs. I’m already using org mode. Add a markdown viewer to it and it works great for me.
It depends on the situation, and I haven't really got a satisfactory solution yet. I used to use neovim for everything, but recently started doing some code and almost all prose in sam. Structural regular expressions have saved me a lot of time (although sometimes not as convenient as recording macros in (neo)vim, it depends), but being able to set $font to a proportional font really helps with me writing prose, although I seem to prefer proportional fonts for code too nowadays.)
I find myself using mousepad (previously leafpad) a lot. Especially for somewhat temporary notes.
Can't believe nobody said notepad++ yet! I really like how you don't even need to name a file, you can just open a new unnamed tab, never name or save it, and the content will be there, even persisting across reboots.
Windows: Notepad++ (old version)
Mac & Linux: TextAdept
Both based on Scintilla and so I have syntax highlighting for looking at the odd code file.
And neovim/vim on Linux/Mac, but I guess that's for configs which count as code for this question.
I have tried to get into vim or helix for note-taking, but I haven't yet figured out a good solution for viewing rendered markdown in real time or navigating through linked notes, so I stick with Obsidian for most of my notes. I'm definitely exploring different solutions because Obsidian is sometimes pretty slow and also not OSS, but it does have a pretty great feature set, especially with plugins. Other plugins that I would give up if I found another good solution but that are great while I'm still using Obsidian are Excalidraw and Dataview. Excalidraw is especially cool for doing quick diagrams directly in my markdown notes that are easily exportable either as svgs individually or embedded in the pdf exports that I sometimes do when I want to share notes with other non-technical people.
I also use Apple Notes quite a bit for notes when I'm not at my computer, or when I want to share lists/notes with my wife.
It varies.
FocusWriter for fiction practice when I need help getting into the flow. LyX for some kinds of non-fiction. gVim feeding into mdBook or a homegrown Markdown processor for others.
I love Bear for most things. For the rest, it’s Typst in either Helix or Zed, whatever I happen to have open already basically.
Neovim for code, but I don't like writing and reading prose in a monospace environment so I use Obsidian for most of my prose writing.
windows 10 notepad for quick notes. usually meeting notes which don't need a lot of structure and don't live long.
notepad is very fast (for small text) and easily accessible. also easy to open any .txt i have saved on the desktop (which is rare)
I use typora. I love the way is what you see is what you get. I grew up in the age of ready, set, go on the Mac and could never really get into not seeing what I'm typing. Being rendered. Typora is also beautiful and it can output to a million billion formats due to the use of pandoc. It's $15 but I kind of want the guy to be able to live so I don't mind paying him.
obsidian + notion. I don't like the ai features in notion, but I apparently can't be arsed to setup sync for obsidian, and it's easy enough to copy+paste from notion back into obsidian -- I used the api to copy everything over first.
After spending too much time configuring NeoViM, I wrote a configuration-free editor named Orbiton. Now I spend time polishing and improving Orbiton instead...
But! I think it is reasonably okay for editing Markdown. Markdown tables can be formatted automatically by pressing ctrl-w. A spartan, but working, table editor can be launched by pressing ctrl-t on a Markdown table. There is syntax highlighting and one can render files to PDF (both with and without pandoc) from the ctrl-o menu.
Orbiton has very few keybindings to learn and has 650+ stars on GitHub. It is available as a package for at least Homebrew, FreeBSD Ports, nixpkgs, Arch and Termux.
If you have comments on how it can be improved for editing Markdown, while adhering to the following leading principles, please let me know:
I use Ghostwriter for writing articles in Markdown (and sometimes as a generic text editor). I appreciate the distraction free mode, but the spell-checker is only partially Markdown syntax.
For notes, I prefer Zotero in cases where I'm worried about citations. I use Obsidian if I want something more free-form.