In this article, we shall review some of the best Markdown editors you can install and use on your Linux desktop. There are numerous Markdown editors you can find for Linux but here, we want to unveil possibly the best you may choose to work with.
For starters, Markdown is a simple and lightweight tool written in Perl, that enables users to write plain text format and convert it to valid HTML (or XHTML). It is literally an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text language and a software tool for text-to-HTML conversion.
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Hoping that you have a slight understanding of what Markdown is, let us proceed to list the editors.
1. Atom
Atom is a modern, cross-platform, open-source, and very powerful text editor that can work on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. Users can customize it down to its base, minus altering any configuration files.
It is designed with some illustrious features and these include:
- Comes with a built-in package manager
- Smart auto-completion functionality
- Offers multiple panes
- Supports find and replace functionality
- Includes a file system browser
- Easily customizable themes
- Highly extensible using open-source packages and many more
Visit Homepage: https://atom.io/
2. GNU Emacs
Emacs is one of the popular open-source text editors you can find on the Linux platform today. It is a great editor for Markdown language, which is highly extensible and customizable.
It’s comprehensively developed with the following amazing features:
- Comes with extensive built-in documentation including tutorials for beginners
- Full Unicode support for probably all human scripts
- Supports content-aware text-editing modes
- Includes syntax coloring for multiple file types
- Its highly customizable using Emacs Lisp code or GUI
- Offers a packaging system for downloading and installing various extensions plus so much more
Visit Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
3. Remarkable
Remarkable is possibly the best Markdown editor you can find on Linux, it also works on Windows operating system. It is indeed a remarkable and fully featured Markdown editor that offers users some exciting features.
Some of its remarkable features include:
- Supports live preview
- Supports exporting to PDF and HTML
- Also offers Github Markdown
- Supports custom CSS
- It also supports syntax highlighting
- Offers keyboard shortcuts
- Highly customizable plus and many more
Visit Homepage: https://remarkableapp.github.io
4. Haroopad
Haroopad is an extensively built, cross-platform Markdown document processor for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It enables users to write expert-level documents of numerous formats including email, reports, blogs, presentations, blog posts, and many more.
It is fully featured with the following notable features:
- Easily imports content
- Also exports to numerous formats
- Broadly supports blogging and mailing
- Supports several mathematical expressions
- Supports Github flavored Markdown and extensions
- Offers users some exciting themes, skins, and UI components plus so much more
Visit Homepage: http://pad.haroopress.com/
5. ReText
ReText is a simple, lightweight, and powerful Markdown editor for Linux and several other POSIX-compatible operating systems. It also doubles as a reStructuredText editor, and has the following attributes:
- Simple and intuitive GUI
- It is highly customizable, users can customize file syntax and configuration options
- Also supports several color schemes
- Supports use of multiple mathematical formulas
- Enables export extensions and many more
Visit Homepage: https://github.com/retext-project/retext
6. UberWriter
UberWriter is a simple and easy-to-use Markdown editor for Linux, it’s development was highly influenced by iA writer for Mac OS X. It also features rich with these remarkable features:
- Uses pandoc to perform all text-to-HTML conversions
- Offers a clean UI
- Offers a distraction-free mode, highlighting a user’s last sentence
- Supports spellcheck
- Also supports full-screen mode
- Supports exporting to PDF, HTML, and RTF using pandoc
- Enables syntax highlighting and mathematical functions plus many more
Visit Homepage: http://uberwriter.wolfvollprecht.de/
7. Mark My Words
Mark My Words is a also lightweight yet powerful Markdown editor. It’s a relatively new editor, therefore offers a handful of features including syntax highlighting, simple and intuitive GUI.
The following are some of the awesome features yet to be bundled into the application:
- Live preview support
- Markdown parsing and file IO
- State management
- Support for exporting to PDF and HTML
- Monitoring files for changes
- Support for preferences
Visit Homepage: https://github.com/voldyman/MarkMyWords
8. Vim-Instant-Markdown Plugin
Vim is a powerful, popular, and open-source text editor for Linux that has stood the test of time. It is great for coding purposes. It is also highly pluggable to enable users to add several other functionalities to it, including Markdown preview.
There are multiple Vim Markdown preview plugins, but you can use Vim-Instant-Markdown which offers the best performance.
9. Bracket-MarkdownPreview Plugin
Brackets is a modern, lightweight, open-source, and also cross-platform text editor. Built specifically for web designing and development purposes. Some of its notable features include support for inline editors, live preview, preprocessor support, and many more.
It is also highly extensible through plugins and you can use the Bracket-MarkdownPreview plugin to write and preview Markdown documents.
10. SublimeText-Markdown Plugin
Sublime Text is a refined, popular, and cross-platform text editor for code, markdown, and prose. It has a high performance enabled by the following exciting features:
- Simple and slick GUI
- Supports multiple selections
- Offers a distraction-free mode
- Supports split editing
- Highly pluggable through Python plugin API
- Fully customizable and offers a command palette
The sublimeText-Markdown plugin is a package that supports syntax highlighting and comes with some good color schemes.
Conclusion
Having walked through the list above, you probably know what Markdown editors and document processors to download and install on your Linux desktop for now.
Note that what we consider to be the best here may reasonably not be the best for you, therefore, you can reveal to us exciting Markdown editors that you think are missing in the list and have earned the right to be mentioned here by sharing your thoughts via the feedback section below.
Great share!
I also recommend a easy, clean, safe Markdown editor: Romanysoft MarkdownD
@MarkdownD
Thanks for sharing this with us, we’ll give it a try.
Thanks!
You should also include Visual Studio Code. It’s a lot like Atom and Brackets, but offers a more complete out of box experience.
@Ted
Thanks for the info, we’ll include it in the list.
Thank you Guy :)
Atom editors very very good :)
@Ali,
Yes, no doubt that Atom editor is one of the best and easy to use code editor available for free..
Guys, check this out! Super fresh! https://caret.io/
Super geek md editor! Loving it.
Oh. Hope you guys don’t flag me as spam xD, but http://www.typora.io/ is also very useful, the visual mode is superb. Hope you like it.
I know more then half of them and they are all basically crap. Only few of them produce correct markdown (like CommonMark) and have no huge bugs, but all of them are either in-line editor or side-by-side editor.
If its an editor – it should not get into the way with any type of synthax. Markdown is really no different from HTML, its just easier to visually parse – thus all “editors” fail as they are really authoring tools, but not text editors. The side-by-side or in-line mode should be optional, and the main mode should be WYSIWYG which is absent.
There is only ONE markdown editor that does it right – and its “Texts”. It is WYSIWYG – means its like LibreOffice, but its:
a) not free, trial, 30 days limit
b) not Linux (but runs in Wine)
What it does is – a full richtext WYSIWYG that outputs and reads in native MD, without all the syntax bursting into the eyes.
Will gladly pay $5-$9 to anyone who creates something like Texts.
@Hunting
Thanks for sharing your experience and offering us some helpful thoughts as well.
Sublime text, has a markdown plugin with live preview using Markmon.
@Sergio Pena
Thanks for letting us know about that, we shall add it to the list above.
Sublime Text plugin has been added to the list and many thanks for the feedback.
Vim also has great support for markdown.
You can use the vim-markdown plugin (among several others) :)
@Ricardo
Thanks for letting us know about the vim-markdown plugin, i actually had not come across it. We shall update the article to include all the markdown editors mentioned by readers.
Vim-markdown plugin for Vim editor is now on the updated list, thanks so much for your feedback.
@Jose Rios
Welcome, thanks for your feedback and appreciation.
I’m surprised that Brackets is not here. Still great list.
@Neo,
Actually, never heard about Brackets, but thanks for updating us about this tool, we will include in the list as suggested..
Thanks alot please include brackets as well, I have used it for about two years now and it’s also nice.
@Givious
We shall update the article to include Brackets as per your recommendation. Thanks for the feedback.
We have successfully added Brackets to the list as you requested. Once again, thanks for the recommendation.
Hey @Aaron Kili
What a great article, I’ve liked Atom and Haroopad text editors. Lots of thanks for giving us new tools and advises to use it about.