Im touched that “Ghostty but for X” is a marketing point but what does it mean in this case? I thought this might be based on the architecture I did for Ghostty. But it’s not. Or it might be full native UI, but it’s not (it’s GPUI). Not trying to be rude or unappreciative but as the creator of Ghostty here… what do you mean?
I’m curious about the overlap between people that want a keyboard driven experience, but also would prefer a Mac-native GUI rather than a TUI or a vim / emacs distro. Seems like a very narrow audience to aim for.
> Markdown is already beautiful. We don't render it. We don't preview it. You read it raw, the way it was meant to be.
I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.
Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.
Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.
I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.
Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.
Agreed. I want my h1’s to be larger than my h2’s. That visual distinction is how I parse data faster. Flat markdown with no formatting feels like it’s missing the point of Markdown.
And are they really proposing that we ought to read italics and *bold* like this?
As others, I find the comparison to ghostty somewhat confusing. Also, this seems like a separate app for what could be a TUI application? Unless I'm missing something.
The idea of showing raw Markdown with just a few colors and maybe some bold/italic variations is compelling, but what about tables? Tables in Markdown can be very useful, but also a pain to type out/format manually.
Auto-save on every keystroke sounds good, but wouldn't that hammer the underlying storage too much for no reason?
And the installation instructions continuing the unfortunate trend of `curl | bash` doesn't help..
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On the topic of Markdown editors, what are the current recommendations (primarily for Linux)? Obsidian is a crowd favorite, but it seems too heavy if I want to only open a single file, especially outside of any vault. Something to preview/edit `README.md` files would be nice.
This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian, which is my go-to "notes app which is just a bunch of markdown files stored to your computer"? I very much like Obsidian, and as I understand it they are your direct competitor, so some indication of how you want to distinguish your app from theirs would be great if you want to compel me to switch. :)
> Every feature we didn't build is time you spend writing.
Also, I feel that this kind of marketing language rubs me the wrong way (perhaps also that it feels LLM-ish). How is you not adding features saving me time? Maybe it saves you time...
Date paths should use at least a double digit numerical index so they are naturally ordered when sorted lexicographically. Numbers also give you i18n for free (assuming Gregorian calendar of course, but it seems that's what this non configurable tool does here).
I've tried a lot of note management but always come back to [potwiki](https://github.com/vim-scripts/potwiki.vim) + "Vim". Only one necessary functional bit in the whole thing, write CamelCase and your word is linked, hit enter on it and you're there.
What's the point of markdown when it's not rendered? Markdown is for formatting things to look different, like headlines and code blocks look actually different, what's the point of typing the characters to format your text if you don't even see the formatting and it looks like plaintext
Bear is my fav answer to this. It's mostly "just markdown", but great design. Nice Apple cloud sync integration. Just the right touch of formatting ("# Header" renders bigger and hash is grey, but still markdown, tables are visually tables, images render inline, etc.
This seems overly complicated. Let the editors be editors.
I recently created a Go application for myself after not finding a note-taking application I liked. Instead of implementing an editor, the application just creates the `%Y-%m-%d.md` file and then opens it in my preferred editor. I have other features, but in the end, all it does is create files or pipe data into the editor I want to use.
I have the same thing; it's a TUI app written in python; all it does is create files with the proper format and has some mild browsing capabilities. It's super nice.
journal # opens 2026-03-07.md in vim
journal yesterday # opens 2026-03-06.md in vim
journal weekly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 07.md into vim
journal monthly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 31.md into vim
journal monthly last month # pipes 2026-02-01 – 28.md into vim
I added support for other editors. For the editors that don't support stdin, it creates a temporary file for the generated pages ("weekly", "monthly", etc.)
It fits my needs perfectly. It removes the friction of note taking. It's easy to backup, search, convert the notes. If I want to use another editor like a WYSIWYG markdown editor, it's trivial to change.
Yeah not to dogpile on this, but looking through the commit history, it seems like this was mainly vibe coded? When I think of "Ghostty but for X", I think of.. something the opposite. Love seeing GPUI projects but the marketing makes it seem disingenuous
> A native macOS note-taking app that feels like Ghostty — GPU-accelerated, keyboard-first, monospace, zero-config.
[1]: https://github.com/mimoo/ghostmd
I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.
Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.
Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.
I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.
Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.
And are they really proposing that we ought to read italics and *bold* like this?
There’s nothing wrong with showing markdown unrendered, but it’s odd to claim it was “meant to be” unrendered.
“Every note app eventually dies. When it does, your notes should survive. Plain .md files will outlive every app, every company, every format war.”
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense — it’s still a format being rendered, otherwise I may as well use notepad.
The idea of showing raw Markdown with just a few colors and maybe some bold/italic variations is compelling, but what about tables? Tables in Markdown can be very useful, but also a pain to type out/format manually.
Auto-save on every keystroke sounds good, but wouldn't that hammer the underlying storage too much for no reason?
And the installation instructions continuing the unfortunate trend of `curl | bash` doesn't help..
-----
On the topic of Markdown editors, what are the current recommendations (primarily for Linux)? Obsidian is a crowd favorite, but it seems too heavy if I want to only open a single file, especially outside of any vault. Something to preview/edit `README.md` files would be nice.
There are other suggestions at https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1023abr/what_is_the_...
> Every feature we didn't build is time you spend writing.
Also, I feel that this kind of marketing language rubs me the wrong way (perhaps also that it feels LLM-ish). How is you not adding features saving me time? Maybe it saves you time...
But also it says: "Raw markdown. No preview pane. That's the point."
So I guess it's intentionally more primitive than notepad, if that's a thing you want?
Somebody updated it; it's now called MacDown 3000 [1].
[1]: https://macdown.app
Date paths should use at least a double digit numerical index so they are naturally ordered when sorted lexicographically. Numbers also give you i18n for free (assuming Gregorian calendar of course, but it seems that's what this non configurable tool does here).
Next week I’m going to build Ghostty for vacation writing.
But I think what’s really going to be huge is Ghostty for text!
Why not a TUI app ? I don't really want a second terminal that only does one thing...
I recently created a Go application for myself after not finding a note-taking application I liked. Instead of implementing an editor, the application just creates the `%Y-%m-%d.md` file and then opens it in my preferred editor. I have other features, but in the end, all it does is create files or pipe data into the editor I want to use.
It fits my needs perfectly. It removes the friction of note taking. It's easy to backup, search, convert the notes. If I want to use another editor like a WYSIWYG markdown editor, it's trivial to change.
How can you even call a program a markdown editor if it does not even render markdown?