 My journey to find a really good writing app has been a long one and while I still really like them There are some problems with it that just kind of keep me from using it for my daily job Just it's just not the perfect tool and while maybe I'm setting my expectations too high I'm really trying to find that application that does what I needed to do in As perfect a manner as possible Maybe like I said my expectations are too high But I'm trying and that has led me to try many different markdown apps over the last couple months Today I'm going to be taking a look at a markdown app called ghost writer and ghost writer is a markdown application That is astonishingly simple in that it does basically what you'd expect of a markdown editor and not much else And that's really good But if you're going to compare it to something like mark text which has a ton of features a ton of settings You might get a little bit disappointed because that's what happened to me So let's first talk about the application and what's good about it first. Let me show you So this is ghost writer and it's available on flat hub. There might be a snap of it I'm not sure but I downloaded this through flat hub and it is a fairly Good application for markdown. It does all the things that you'd expect markdown editor to do It has a preview pane on the side it has your writing area on the left hand side and then it has a By default table of contents along the sidebar over here And it does a few things that are really cool, especially if you are using this for long form writing Which is probably what you're going to use it for The thing that I enjoyed about it most and the thing that I miss about it when I go back to mark text Is this feature right here? It will keep track of from the moment you start writing to the moment you end writing It'll keep track of how many words you've written how many pages you've written your average words per minute How long that amount of words would take to read and how much time you spent idle? So as you can see since I've opened up the application I'm at a hundred percent all time because I've done no typing right and those statistics are Amazing and as far as I can tell this is the only application that does this type of thing built in I know there are other applications that can do this but built in this is the only one I've ever found like this now that like I said is something that I truly miss when I go to a different application because I always keep track of How many words that I've written if I'm doing writing myself and then I like the idea of being able to have an average word per minute Even if I don't know how accurate it is and I like the idea of being held accountable for how much time I've actually moved away from what I'm supposed to be doing and moved over to YouTube You know because that happens astonishingly a lot maybe not astonishingly It definitely happens a lot So those statistics are really really nice to have it also shows you right here How many words character senses paragraphs and stuff that are in in the entire document Which is which is something that almost every writer app has and if you don't know mark down all that well It has a little cheat sheet that's here 100% of the time so if you need to know how to create a bullet list or a block quote or Add a code block or something like that you can find out those things right here And you don't have to go anywhere to find those they're just right here by the click of a button So the sidebar is actually very very useful the place where this falls down a little bit is in the settings now When you open up the settings, you'll see that there's just not a ton of stuff here There's autosave and backup file on save which is very nice that that's definitely a very good feature to have It does remember your session So if you close the application the next time you open it up It'll take you exactly back to where you were and then there are a few settings for the editor itself So you can change the styling how it handles tabs and things like that and then finally there's a spell checker That's all there is in terms of settings other than theming. That's all you get now It's not right to judge a application based on how many settings it has because a Application can be fantastic and have very few settings, you know I mean, so I'm not really judging this based on how many settings it has It's just that I'm comparing it to an application like mark text that has a ton of settings and a ton of options So coming here to this one and seeing that it's kind of minimalistic was a little bit of a shock to the system It doesn't mean that it's bad It just means that I'm comparing the two and it was a little bit of a shock now Ghostwriter does have a distraction free mode So if you hit this button here It will take you into the distraction free mode and you can turn the preview off if you want to so if you Want to do just complete distraction free you can do that and Obviously, there's a full screen mode as well So if you wanted to go completely full screen even though my poly bar still shows up you can see that and down here at the Bottom it tells you how many words are in the document and you can see more statistics By clicking on that and it shows you the time and you can get to the sidebar and stuff as well By clicking this button over here. So there are those added features there One of the places where Ghostwriter does a really good job is actually with theming So if we go down here to this little gear icon hit themes We can see that there are two default themes that are already loaded And then you can create your own thing by just hitting the plus icon and then you can name it and do the foreground background create a dark and a light mode of them And it's really nice that you can create your theme right here with the application That's not something that is very common outside of a terminal like you can obviously do this in a terminal But if you wanted to do this in another application a lot of times you'd have to get into a config file somewhere And that can be tedious for people who aren't really interested in Splunking into a config file. This is a gooey way of creating your own thing Which is really nice now if you watched my video on mark tech to which I highly recommend you do I'll leave that link in the video description and probably try to put it in a card up there somewhere You'll know that I really really like that application And I'm still using that as my main writing tool today And it's not something that I'm planning on switching away from because I like having all those extra features that mark text offers and There's one big flaw to ghostwriter that I don't like and that is that white bar up there along the top I can't stand it if I'm in distraction free writing mode right here for whatever reason that white bar won't go away Unless you go to full screen if you earn full screen it does go away, which is okay, but I never go to full screen I always prefer having a clock up there all of my Bar stuff and maybe I should get used to using full screen It would get me to stop doing the whole distraction thing, but that's just not really the way I work so I'm always in this mode right here and That white bar up there at the top drives me bonkers. I keep it like stands out too much So that is a big downside now that is not really a ghostwriter problem That is going to be a window manager issue the screenshots that I've seen of this in KDE and Genome both of the show Ghostwriter looking fantastic, but in a window manager where there is no header bar No closed buttons or anything like that. All that's left is the file menu and as far as I can tell There's no getting rid of that. I've looked through the settings There is a setting to have it come and go in the full screen mode But there is no option to get rid of it in regular mode, which is very disappointing because otherwise This is a very nice little application. It's simplistic sure, but there's nothing wrong with that It would actually allow people who aren't really interested in doing all the tweaking and stuff like that to Just get in there edit a file and leave and that is what most people want to do So ghostwriter is a fantastic option for that I just wish that that white bar would go away and then maybe I could use it But again, I'm being very very nitpicky when it comes to that when I write something And I want to stay focused on something something that is a tune tone different color than the theme that I'm using It's going to drive me bonkers. And it's just that's the way it is So ghostwriter is a great application, but it's not for me I'm going to be sticking with mark text But I'm going to continue looking at other markdown editors If you have a markdown editor that you'd like me to take a look at leave that in the comment section below Don't leave a link YouTube will delete it. So just the name of it will do any other comments Obviously comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter as Linux cast You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com Slash Linux cast just like all these fine people. I really do appreciate everybody who supports me on patreon YouTube without you guys The channel probably wouldn't be where it is now. So I really do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time