Zettlr, a free and open source Markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing, had a new release recently (1.7.0, followed by 1.7.1 to fix some issues) which adds Vim and Emacs input modes, tabs support, and faster application startup time thanks to caching, along with many other improvements.
Zettlr features:
- In-place Markdown preview
- Integration with reference managers such as Zotero or JabRef
- Citations using JSON or BibTex
- Projects support
- Code highlighting for many languages
- Export using Pandoc, LaTeX, and Textbundle, allowing you to export to formats like HTML, PDF, OpenDocument, Word, RTF, and more
- Full text search with an integrated heatmap
- Full Zettelkasten support
- Includes 5 themes and dark mode (with optional built-in schedule)
- Word counter and writing statistics
- File tagging and tag management
- Spellchecking / autocorrect
- Built-in Pomodoro timer
- Distraction-free mode
- Available in 14 languages
This is an Electron application. If you prefer a GTK3 Markdown editor, check out Marker.
The new Zettlr 1.7 version comes with a rewritten filesystem core, which brings supports for opening documents in tabs, easier file management, less RAM usage, and faster application startup time thanks to caching (by up to 95% once the cache has been filled). The tabs title display the frontmatter title o filename, and on hover you can get some additional information like the number of words and characters, and tags used by that file.
This release also brings various user interface improvements, like new icons almost everywhere, fixed context menus in some places, all themes were updated, and there’s also a new theme, called Bordeaux. Furthermore, the dialogs now respect the dark mode setting.
Yet another important change in Zettlr 1.7 is the addition of Vim and Emacs input modes. You can switch from the normal to Vim or Emacs input modes from the application preferences, on the Editor tab.
You may also like: How To Add Markdown Support To Gedit Using `Markdown Preview` Plugin
There are many other changes in Zettlr 1.7, including:
- Windows-installers are finally code-signed, so no more warnings from your operating system
- New syntax highlighting languages
- A huge amount of improvements to the editor itself (both display and behavior)
- A new, interactive tutorial for new users
- RTL support
- Added syntax highlighting modes for Elm, F#, Haskell, VB.net, HTML, XML, Markdown, Julia, Turtle, SPARQL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, Tcl, CommonLisp, Scheme and PowerShell
- Copying images from the Explorer/Finder/file browser now offers to insert them into the document, copying them over to the assets directory
- The global search bar autocomplete will now also work for non-western scripts such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or any other
- On Linux, the default window decorations have been restored — that is, the burger menu button is gone, and the menu will be displayed wherever the window manager decides
- More
Related: Mark Text: FOSS Markdown Editor With Realtime Preview
Download Zettlr
Zettlr is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.
On Linux there are DEB packages for Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS and so on, RPM packages for Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS and other RPM-based Linux distributions, as well as an unofficial Arch Linux / Manjaro AUR package. There’s also an AppImage that should work on any Linux distribution.
