Switcher 2026: Markdown Editors ⭐️

I use Markdown for all writing and Typora is my weapon of choice. But there are all kinds of alternatives out there. And some of them are worth knowing about.

📝 Why Markdown
I watch a lot of personal technology videos on YouTube, as you might imagine, and so my feed sometimes tosses out serendipitous content like this one, in which a professional writer goes through a list of mostly obvious Microsoft Word alternatives. I had never heard of this guy or his channel, but it's thoughtful and not a screed in any way. And God help me, I watched/listened to the whole thing. I guess you'd say it's in my wheelhouse.
I always needed a word processor, of course, and when I became a professional writer in the early 1990s, Microsoft Word was pretty much the choice as it was the best word processor and publishing companies not only required its use but also very specific templates that aided them during the then-lengthy editing process. So Microsoft Word holds an interesting place in my personal history with technology. I aspired to using it early on, and then I used it for decades. But even early on, I was acutely aware that I was using only a tiny fraction of its features. And as familiarity grew, I wanted something simpler.
That, in essence, is what the video linked above is about. Not so much that Word is "bloated," slow, or complex or whatever, but rather an acknowledgment that writers, like so many others, simply want to get the job done without distractions. This is the problem I wrote about in The Shortest Path from Thoughts to Words (Premium) and elsewhere, and it describes my slow but steady migration from Word and its document formats to Markdown.
As you may know, I may write a book about Markdown, and since publishing that first chapter/article, I've blocked out a few other chapters. I've also decided to better frame this thing as "Markdown for writers" specifically, which was always my intent but perhaps needed to be more explicit. If you think about the act of writing, there is the blurting out of words on the screen, which I am very good at, and then a fine-tuning or editing process through which you finalize that thing and then publish it. Which I am less good at.
But here, I came to understand early on that things were changing. I may have wanted a simpler tool than Word, say, 20 years ago, but Word was the thing that was supported everywhere, from the publishers who made the books I wrote to the magazine I contributed to and the web forms I used to paste and publish the articles I wrote. Technology has always moved quickly, and so by the late 2000s, I was trying to convince my book publisher to embrace eBooks that could be updated as needed, something that's impossible when you commit to paper. After a lot of push and pull, I eventually dropped them and started self-publishing.
This changed my workflow quite a bit, and thanks to Rafael, I learned about Markdown and started using (what is now a basically unsupported) app called...