Markdown is a lightweight markup language that is useful for adding formatting while still maintaining readability when viewing as plain text. Markdown (and Markdown derivatives) are used extensively as the primary form of markup of documents on services like GitHub and pagure. By design, Markdown is easily created and edited in a text editor, however, there are a multitude of editors available that provide a formatted preview of Markdown markup, and / or provide a text editor that highlights the markdown syntax.

This article covers 3 desktop applications for Fedora Workstation that help out when editing Markdown.

UberWriter

UberWriter is a minimal Markdown editor and previewer that allows you to edit in text, and preview the rendered document.

The editor itself has inline previews built in, so text marked up as bold is displayed bold. The editor also provides inline previews for images, formulas, footnotes, and more. Ctrl-clicking one of these items in the markup provides an instant preview of that element to appear.

In addition to the editor features, UberWriter also features a full screen mode and a focus mode to help minimise distractions. Focus mode greys out all but the current paragraph to help you focus on that element in your document

Install UberWriter on Fedora from the 3rd-party Flathub repositories. It can be installed directly from the Software application after setting up your system to install from Flathub

Marker

Marker is a Markdown editor that provides a simple text editor to write Markdown in, and provides a live preview of the rendered document. The interface is designed with a split screen layout with the editor on the left, and the live preview on the right.

Additionally, Marker allows you to export you document in a range of different formats, including HTML, PDF, and the Open Document Format (ODF).

Install Marker on Fedora from the 3rd-party Flathub repositories. It can be installed directly from the Software application after setting up your system to install from Flathub

Ghostwriter

Where the previous editors are more focussed on a minimal user experice, Ghostwriter provides many more features and options to play with. Ghostwriter provides a text editor that is partially styled as you write in Markdown format. Bold text is bold, and headings are in a larger font to assist in writing the markup.

It also provides a split screen with a live updating preview of the rendered document.

Ghostwriter also includes a range of other features, including the ability to choose the Markdown flavour that the preview is rendered in, as well as the stylesheet used to render the preview too.

Additionally, it provides a format menu (and keyboard shortcuts) to insert some of the frequent markdown ‘tags’ like bold, bullets, and italics.

Install Ghostwriter on Fedora from the 3rd-party Flathub repositories. It can be installed directly from the Software application after setting up your system to install from Flathub