ReText is an editor for Markdown and reStructuredText which features live preview, tabs, math formulas support and it can export to PDF, ODT and HTML.





ReText 6.0 was released today includes some useful changes, like automatically scrolling the live preview to match its position in the editor (for Markdown only), improved responsiveness for the editor thanks to markup conversion now being performed in a background process, and more.









the live preview now automatically scrolls to match its position with the editor (only for Markdown);

markup conversion is now performed in a background process, improving responsiveness of the editor;

images can now be copied and pasted into ReText;

added a button to quickly close the search bar;

added basic CSS styling for tables;

replaced the tags box with the new "Formatting" box for Markdown;

hitting return twice now ends the Markdown list;

reText now depends on version 2.0 or higher of pymarkups;

the QtWebKit dependency is now optional (though still recommended).

ReText is officially supported on Linux only, but it can run on Windows and Mac OS X too, though there are no binaries available for download.





For more information about ReText, including how to enable and use additional Markdown features using Markdown syntax extensions, how to use Math formulas in Markdown with ReText, configuration, table editing mode and more, see the ReText wiki

Install ReText in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives

ReText is already available in the official Ubuntu repositories, but it's an older version (5.3 for Xenial, 5.2 for Wily and 4.1.2 for Trusty). If you prefer to use the version available in the official Ubuntu repositories, install it using the following command:

sudo apt install retext

The latest ReText is not available in a PPA for now so to install it, you can either do it manually by using its source or use Python3 pip.





Using the commands below, you can install the latest ReText in Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint and derivatives for the current user, using Python3 pip (and remove ReText if it's already installed from the repositories):

sudo apt remove retext sudo apt install python3-pip python3-pyqt5 python3 -m pip install retext --user sed -i "s|Exec=.*|Exec=$HOME/.local/bin/retext %F|" ~/.local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop sed -i "s|Icon=.*|Icon=$HOME/.local/share/retext/icons/retext.png|" ~/.local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop

The last two commands should fix the ReText desktop file which doesn't have the correct executable and icon path. Once installed, you may need to logout and log back in to get ReText to show up in the menu / Dash.





If later on you want to update ReText via pip, use the following command (simply append "--upgrade" to the install command):

python3 -m pip install retext --user --upgrade

For other Linux distributions, install Python3 pip and PyQt5 and use the same instructions as above, skipping the "apt" part.