The same WYSIWYG markdown editor in a shell that ships in megabytes, not hundreds of them.
Available for Linux, macOS and Windows.
This is a fork. MarkText is the original, by Jocs and its contributors, and everything good about the editing experience is theirs. marktext-light replaces the Electron shell with Tauri 2 and keeps the Vue 3 renderer, so what changes is what the app costs to start and to install — not how it edits. Upstream is the place to go for the project itself, its docs and its sponsors.
- Realtime preview (WYSIWYG) and a clean and simple interface to get a distraction-free writing experience.
- Support CommonMark Spec, GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec and selective support Pandoc markdown.
- Markdown extensions such as math expressions (KaTeX), front matter and emojis.
- Support paragraphs and inline style shortcuts to improve your writing efficiency.
- Output HTML and PDF files.
- Various themes: Cadmium Light, Material Dark etc.
- Various editing modes: Source Code mode, Typewriter mode, Focus mode.
- Paste images directly from clipboard.
Everything below is measured on this repository's own builds, not estimated.
- A ~6.7 MB Windows installer, because a Tauri app links the system WebView instead of bundling a browser. Linux, macOS and Windows installers are built by CI on every release — see the releases.
- Something on screen in the document's first frame. A Tauri window is a WebView and nothing else, so there is no native surface to draw a loading screen on while the WebView starts. The loading screen is therefore written into the document itself — no script, no stylesheet, no image — and paints as early as anything can.
- Startup you can read. Every phase from process start to the first document on
screen is timed and written to
startup.login the app's log directory, shell and renderer halves in one file. Optimisation work here is held to that trace. - Large documents. Two quadratics in the parser and the event table, plus layout thrashing in code-block line numbers, are gone: a 68 KB code-heavy document went from 3007 ms to 675 ms to open.
- One window, many tabs. Opening a second file — from the CLI, a file association, or the dock — focuses the running window and adds a tab instead of starting another process.
- Ten UI languages (de, en, es, fr, ja, ko, pt, tr, zh-CN, zh-TW), with a test that fails the build on an untranslated string or a missing key.
- Dark mode follows the OS by default and remembers an explicit choice across restarts, including the frame before any stylesheet has loaded.
Two tables, because the three projects are not knowable to the same depth. Everything in the first column of both tables was measured in this repository. The MarkText column comes from reading its source, which is the same codebase this was forked from. The Typora column comes from typora.io and store.typora.io, checked on 2026-09-01 — Typora is a commercial product with no public source, so nothing about its internals is claimed here.
| marktext-light | MarkText | Typora | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT | MIT | Proprietary, no public source |
| Price | Free | Free | US$14.99 without tax, 15-day trial, up to 3 devices |
| Shell | Tauri 2 — links the system WebView | Electron 42 — ships its own Chromium | Not stated by the vendor |
| Windows installer | 6 MB | Not measured here | Not published |
| Other installers | deb/rpm 8 MB, dmg 7 MB, AppImage 82 MB | Not measured here | Not published |
| Builds published for | Linux x64, Windows x64, macOS x64 + arm64 | The same, plus Windows arm64 | macOS, Windows 64-bit/32-bit/ARM, Linux |
| Interface languages | 10 | 10 | Not stated by the vendor |
The AppImage is the outlier for a reason: it carries the GTK and WebKit libraries the other Linux packages take from the distribution. Size is the one axis where linking the system WebView shows up plainly, and it is not a claim about speed — see the note under What the fork changes.
Both directions. The features below are absent from this build because the Electron main process implemented them and nothing here has replaced it yet; they are tracked, not forgotten.
| marktext-light | MarkText | |
|---|---|---|
| Opening several files | Tabs in one window, always | Tabs by default; a preference can open new windows instead |
| Tabs restored on relaunch | No — deliberate; the recent-files drawer is what survives | Yes |
| Saving | Atomic: written to a temp file, flushed, then renamed | Atomic (write-file-atomic) |
| Legacy encodings | GBK, Big5, EUC-KR, Shift_JIS, UTF-16, and a byte-order mark stripped on read | The same, via ced + iconv-lite |
| Window size and position | Remembered, and only restored onto a display that still exists | The same, via electron-window-state |
| Auto-update | No — and absent from every menu rather than present and dead | Yes |
| Custom keybindings | No — the list is shown, the editing controls are disabled and say why | Yes |
| Uploading images to a host | No — the attempt fails with a message and the image is saved beside the document | Yes, through the PicGo CLI or a script of your own |
| Spell-check dictionaries | No — spelling is the system WebView's, with no dictionary list and no custom words | Chromium's spell checker, with a dictionary list and a custom word list |
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.2 | 2026-09-02 | A markdown link to a script or installer is refused rather than handed to the OS. Links open again at all — an external URL in the browser, a markdown file as another tab. Open File keeps a document's encoding and line ending. Files named on the command line all open, and no longer hold up the first frame. Find Next and Find Previous work. |
| 1.0.1 | 2026-09-01 | Documents no longer lose a heading to a byte-order mark, or fail to open because they are GBK. Saves are atomic. A preference changed in the settings window reaches the editor. The window remembers where it was. |
| 1.0.0 | 2026-08-31 | First tagged release of the Tauri shell. Loading screen on first paint; startup, large-document and memory work from the migration. |
Grab an installer from the latest release. Release assets are the bare installer files — GitHub does not wrap them in a zip the way it does workflow artifacts.
Each platform links the system WebView rather than bundling one, which is where most of the size saving comes from — and it is also the one thing to have on the machine before installing.
An NSIS installer (.exe) for x64. It needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime,
which ships with Windows 11 and is installed by the setup wizard on Windows 10 if it
is missing. No arm64 build is published yet.
A .dmg each for arm64 and x64 — no universal build, so pick the one matching
your machine. The WebView (WKWebView) is part of the OS; nothing else to install.
The app is not code-signed or notarised, so Gatekeeper will refuse it on first
open: right-click the app and choose Open, or clear the quarantine attribute with
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/marktext-light.app.
An .AppImage, a .deb and an .rpm for x64. All three need webkit2gtk 4.1 and
GTK 3 from your distribution — the same stack CI installs to build them:
# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 libgtk-3-0 libayatana-appindicator3-1If a build for your platform is missing or fails to start, please open an issue on this repository — not on upstream MarkText, which does not ship these builds.
If you wish to build marktext-light yourself, start from CLAUDE.md for the repository layout and commands, and the upstream build instructions for the platform prerequisites. Note that release installers are built by CI, not locally.
Questions and bugs about this fork belong in its issue tracker; questions about the editor itself are better asked upstream. PRs are welcome either way.
Please read the Contributing Guide before opening a pull request. Day-to-day work lands on develop; main carries the released versions and is where tags are cut from.
This fork stands on the work of everyone who has contributed to MarkText.
MIT, the same as upstream MarkText.