 If you've watched my channel for any amount of time, you know about six months ago or so, I made a video where I was talking about how I was going to switch to VIM for all of my professional writing. Now, I'm a writer by trade, and I spend just a ton of time in a text editor. And six months ago, I decided VIM was going to be that text editor. I love VIM, the key bindings for VIM are fantastic. There's just a ton of stuff in VIM that you can do, which is just amazing, right? I think that everybody knows that I like VIM. But my experiment is at an end. Unfortunately, VIM has its own problems when it's dealing with the documents, the size of the documents that I tend to deal with, and they just don't work all that well inside of VIM, which is just sad for me. So I've been over the last month or so trying to find a GUI text editor, or more accurately, a GUI markdown editor, that is good. Now, I've tried Obsidian. I'm not a big fan of it. It doesn't really do well with documents that were created outside of Obsidian. So if you have to deal with stuff that was created by other people, or you have a fuller or directory full of just a whole bunch of markdown files, it doesn't seem to deal all that well with those things. You can do them, it just, it kind of just doesn't work all that well. So I've been using just a ton of different markdown editors over the last month. And I think after using several different ones, I found my favorite one. And that favorite is called MarkText. Now, MarkText is a markdown editor that is very simple and that it is just a markdown editor. It doesn't have syncing, it doesn't have any of that kind of stuff. It does markdown and it does it really well. Now, just because I say it just does markdown, doesn't mean that it's lacking in features or lacking in settings that you can play with. That's not true at all. It has a very full featured settings application that allows you to tweak pretty much everything you want about it, which is amazing. It's really, really good. So let me show you what MarkText looks like right out of the box. This is MarkText out of the box and as you can tell, it's very bright, right? If you don't like bright themes out of the box, this is not going to do it for you. Thankfully, and I'm going to do this right off the bat, MarkText comes with several different themes built in for it. So you just go up to this hamburger menu up here theme and you can choose from several different themes. And obviously the best one here is dark. Now, there's a couple other dark ones here. This is just one of them that I've chosen. It's very, very good. It's a dark theme, right? And I think that this obviously should be default. I think all dark themes should be default. I think that all light themes should just go away, but that's a video for another time. So what makes MarkText good? Well, first of all, it's immediate in the preview of the markdown that you write. So if you write a headline, so we got a headline here, like so it changes it automatically. There's no separate preview pane or anything like that. Now I know some people prefer the separate preview pane. I've never been that way. I prefer to have my markdown immediately translated into what it's supposed to be. The same thing with lists or something. So this is a list. This is a list. And as you can see, it knows that you're doing a list so it automatically creates the next list item for you, which is not a given when it comes to markdown editors. Let me tell you, for some reason, in fact, I'd say at least half of the markdown editors that I've tried over the last month, maybe even for that, when you create a list like this, it doesn't assume that you're gonna make another list item afterwards. It just moves you back to the beginning and you have to do another asterisk in order to create your next list item. So that's kind of a pain in the ass, but this one here does it just fine and that's the way it should work. Obviously to get out of that, you just delete and that moves you back to the regular mode. So that's the first thing that is great about marktext and it's maybe not the most unique feature because a lot of them do that as well. The whole immediately translating markdown to what it's supposed to be, but I like it and it works really well. Another thing that is always important for me when it comes to this type of thing is that it has a word counter that is immediately visible. So you may not even be able to see this, it's up here and it just shows you how many words you have. One thing about the word counter that I'm a little bit disappointed by is that when you highlight words, it doesn't change to tell you how many words you've highlighted. That's something that I use all the time because of SEO purposes. You have to have a certain number of words between H1 headers in certain articles. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you how many words you have when you highlight them. So that's a little bit disappointing. I wish that was a feature, but it's not. Another great thing about marktext is that it does have the ability to edit text without knowing markdown. So if you don't know any markdown at all, which I highly suggest you learn it, but if you don't know any markdown at all, you can still use this without being proficient in markdown. You can just start writing something, writing something like so, and then you can highlight that if you wanted to. Let's just say you wanted to make this bold. You could highlight it and make it bold just like so. You could obviously also use control B to make something bold. And if you wanted to make this a heading, you could do so by going up here, go into paragraph, heading one, and then it would make heading one. And that is very nice for people who don't know what the markdown syntax means, and that means that they can use this too, which is really nice. Now I know all those things, so I barely ever use that menu, but there are some things in here in the paragraph and format menus that allow me to kind of remember things that markdown can do that I don't really use all that often. So things like the math block, things like the HTML block, those things are things that I don't ever use, but they are there if you need them. And if you don't know what the markdown syntax is for those things, you can come here to do that. And the other cool thing that's about this is that every single markdown, or every single piece of markdown syntax has a key binding associated with it. So if you wanted to create a heading one, you could do alt control one. And same thing with heading two, three, four, they all have key bindings associated with them. And if you were in a tiling window manager might be thinking, well, what if I have key bindings that conflict with those? Because you may do. Well, if you go into the settings, which I'm going to show you here now, if you go to preferences, you can actually change all the key bindings. Every single one of them is fully editable. If that's a word, editable. Yeah, I think that's a word. Anyways, all the key bindings you can edit right from here. And that is, again, not something you should take for granted because in a lot of markdown editors you can't edit the key bindings at all. And the ones that you are able to edit the key bindings in usually limits you to the main key bindings, like just a few of them like opening a new document, whatever, those type of things. You don't get access to every single one of them like you do here, which is cool. Also neat is that you can just use this here for a cheat sheet if you needed to know what a key binding was. So you can just use that here. So those are the key bindings. And that is probably my favorite part because you can use this to really streamline your workflow so that you never have to deal with any of those menus or anything like that. And if you find yourself more efficient with the key bindings than you are with some markdown texts. So for example, and I've talked about this before, I never know the difference between the markdown syntax for an image and a link. They're very, very similar, right? One of them has an exclamation point. One of them doesn't. It doesn't matter how often I look that thing up. Like I've looked it up 20,000 times. I never remember which one is which ever. But with marktext, I can create a key binding or it has a key binding. I can then use that key binding just to put that syntax into the document however I want. I can either highlight the text that I want or I can just create it right off the bat. And that's amazing because that means I don't have to look that syntax up anymore, which is amazing. So the key bindings, like I said, is probably my favorite part of this. Now in terms of other settings, another neat thing is that it has a lot of settings and they do have a search bar here. So if you need to search for a particular setting, you can do so. It's again, something that you should not take for granted because that's not something that is true of all applications really. Because a lot of times you have a lot of settings in no way to sort through them, which is always kind of a pain in the butt. In terms of other settings, there is an auto-save functionality. It is not enabled by default. So just keep that in mind. If you go in there and make an edit into a document and close it, you didn't save it, okay? Most people probably already know that but if you didn't know that and you expected it to save it automatically, you'd be pretty sad. But you can turn auto-save on and you can change the amount of time it takes between auto-saves as well, which is cool. You can also hide the scroll bars. You can set it so that it'll open all new files in a new window. The one thing that I kind of wish that this had was tabs because if this had tabs, you could have multiple documents open at once without having them all in separate windows. It's not a big deal, but I wish it had tabs. You can also make some changes for the editor. There's quite a few things here, like things like font writing behavior, stuff like that. Oh, that's another thing that I forgot to show you is that that also comes with a typewriter mode and a focus mode. It has a sidebar here so that you can see the files that you're in. So you can switch between files if you wanted to do that. The focus mode and the typewriter mode are things that I use all the time because it allows you to kind of create a distraction free writing mode. I wish there was a way to turn them on both at the same time, but that's not a big deal. You can just do that. So those are another two features that I really, really like. You can also make some changes to how mark text handles mark down syntax itself. So you can change what the marker is for bullet list, ordered lists and things like that. You can change the front matter format. You can change how mark text handles HTML. So if you want it to render it or not, you can do that. You can also enable get lab compatibility mode, which is cool if you use get lab. It does come with a built in spell checker, but it's not enabled by default. So just keep that in mind. These are the themes that does show you what the themes look like, which is cool. So you get a preview of that. You can also have it set automatically if you change system themes, which is also cool. And then finally, you can change some settings to how it handles images. So if you wanted to have the image stay in the same place or move it to the same directory of the file, however you want that handled, you can change that from here. So I love mark text. I think it's fantastic. It's fast. It's easy to use. It doesn't come with a ton of features that you don't really need. So like I don't need sync features or anything like that. I don't need the knowledge graph stuff that Obsidian has. None of that stuff I need. I just need a markdown editor and mark text seems to be the best one that I've tried so far. Now I'm sure there are other markdown editors out there that are as good or better than this one. I just haven't tried them yet. Mark text is the one that like I said has been the one that I've just kind of fallen in love with so far. There's just just enough features that make me happy. So I can make a lot of changes to the UI, how it handles markdown and things like that, but not so many features that I'm overwhelmed. They're just never used those things. And it has the focus mode typewriter mode that is something that I really enjoyed in Vim. So if you watch my videos on Vim, you know that I was using Goyo and Limelight. Those basically created a distraction for your writing mode in Vim. That's similar to what this is. And add on top of all that, the editability, editability of key bindings is just amazing. So it's not something that I use all the time, but that you can do that is still something that makes me really, really happy. So that is mark text. Again, I think that this is by far the favorite for me going forward. It's the one that I'm going to use with my daily writing going forward. I'm a little disappointed that I'm having to abandon Vim for doing all of my writing. It's a little disappointing. And maybe someday I'll be able to figure out what makes Vim slow down so much, but until then I can use mark text and still get all of my work done, which is great. So, oh, before I go, I should talk about installation. I probably should have talked about this earlier, but mark text is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, obviously. And if you want to download it on Linux, you can do so. I think it's in the AUR, don't quote me on that. I'm not an arch, so I can actually test that. But it was available as a flat pack. There is an app image if you prefer an app image. Not sure if there's a snap, but there are multiples options for you to get this. So, however you need to get it, you probably can. So, that is mark text. If you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. If you want to follow me on Mastodon or any of my other social media networks, you can find those links in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast, just like all these fine people. I want to take a moment to thank all of you who support me on Patreon and YouTube. It just means so damn much to me. I can't even begin to tell you how much it just boggles my mind that you guys support me. And I truly do appreciate it. So, thank you so very, very much. I will see you guys next time. Thanks everyone for watching. I'll see you next time.