Marklet next to the usual suspects

Typora invented the feeling most of these apps copy: one pane, no preview, syntax that gets out of the way. It is also a genuinely mature product with export formats Marklet does not have.

Where Typora wins: export to PDF, HTML, Word, and ePub with real templates; Mermaid, flowcharts, and sequence diagrams; a large theme community; years of edge cases already found and fixed.

Where Marklet wins: it is a fifth of the size and draws through the macOS text system rather than a web page, so system spell check, the font panel, services, and native window tabs are the real ones. Code blocks get a copy button, which Typora still does not have. And for the launch window it costs nothing at all.

Pick Typora if you export documents for other people all day, or you need diagrams. Pick Marklet if the document lives on your Mac and you want the editor to feel like the rest of your Mac.

iA Writer is the most respected app on this page, and it is the closest to Marklet in one important way: it works on your own files rather than importing them into a library. If you write long prose, it is probably the better tool, and it is not close.

Where iA Writer wins: everything around the writing. Focus mode, syntax highlighting that colors parts of speech, style check for clichés and filler, authorship tracking that separates what you typed from what you pasted or generated, and export to HTML, PDF, and Word. It runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and iPad, so your work follows you off the Mac. It is also fifteen years of polish.

Where Marklet differs: iA Writer does not really render Markdown while you write. It styles the syntax, which iA calls Auto-Markdown, but the document itself stays raw text. Rendering happens in the Preview: iA's own documentation says a task list item is ticked off "in the Preview", and its Content Blocks page says embedded files "are rendered in the Preview", with the caption describing content blocks "in the Editor displayed as full text". So images do not appear in your document, links stay as bracket and parenthesis syntax, and tables stay as pipes until you open the other pane.

Marklet has no other pane. The image draws under its line, the link becomes a link you can click, the table becomes a grid you Tab through, and the syntax comes back only where your caret is. That is the entire difference between the two apps, and it is worth trying both to see which one you actually want. Marklet is also 8.7 MB and, for now, free.

The price gap is the honest headline. iA Writer is $49.99 on the Mac as a single purchase, and their pricing page notes that one time is not the same as lifetime, since major versions can be a new purchase. Marklet is $0 during launch and $2.99 after.

Pick iA Writer if writing is the job and you want the tools built around the act of writing. Pick Marklet if the job is a document that has to be right, and you want to see it as it will be while you edit it.

MarkText is the free and open source answer to Typora, and it earned a lot of goodwill doing it. The catch is arithmetic: the copy measured for this page is version 0.17.1, whose last release was in 2022, and it carries a full Chromium runtime to edit a text file.

Where MarkText wins: the source is MIT licensed and yours to fork; it runs on Windows and Linux too; it exports HTML and PDF; it has diagrams.

Where Marklet wins: 285 MB becomes 8.7 MB, it is still being developed, and it is a Mac app rather than a web app in a window. Sandboxed with no network access, so nothing you type has anywhere to go.

Pick MarkText if you need the same editor on three operating systems, or you want to read and change the code today. Pick Marklet if you are on a Mac and would rather not run a browser to write a list.

Obsidian is not really a Markdown editor, it is a knowledge base that edits Markdown. Backlinks, graph view, daily notes, canvas, and a plugin ecosystem large enough to have its own subculture. Marklet does none of that on purpose.

Where Obsidian wins: linking notes together, searching a whole vault, plugins for anything you can name, sync across devices, and community themes.

Where Marklet wins: it opens the file you double clicked without adopting the folder around it into a vault, while still understanding wikilinks, so notes that point at each other keep working. It is 8.7 MB against 441 MB. It behaves like a document based Mac app, with a real title bar rename, native tabs, autosave, and versions.

Pick Obsidian if you are building a second brain. Pick Marklet if you want to open a README, fix it, and close it.

Marklet's role model is CotEditor: a fast, native, document based editor with almost no chrome. If you already write Markdown in one of these, you are used to reading raw syntax and you may like it that way.

Where they win: they open anything, they handle enormous files, they do encodings, line endings, and regular expression search across many files. They are general purpose in a way Marklet is not.

Where Marklet wins: it renders while you type. Tables become grids, checkboxes become clickable, math and images draw in the document, and the markers hide when your caret leaves them, without ever converting the file into anything but text.

Pick a plain text editor if Markdown is one of twenty file types you touch. Pick Marklet if Markdown is the one you touch most.

Marklet reads and writes UTF-8 plain text. There is no database, no proprietary wrapper, and no hidden metadata. Rendering happens in the editor's drawing layer, so the file on disk only ever contains what you typed. Open the same file in TextEdit, Vim, or GitHub and it is identical.

When your caret is somewhere else, the syntax characters around an element are collapsed to nothing and the styled result is drawn in their place. Move the caret into the element and the raw characters come straight back, in the same position, ready to edit. Nothing is converted and nothing is regenerated, which is why undo, find, and select all keep working the way you expect.

If you would rather see dimmed markers everywhere, turn Live Formatting off in Settings and you get the older, quieter behavior.

The megabytes themselves are cheap. What they represent is not: a bundled browser means a browser process tree, its memory, its own text engine, and its own idea of how a text caret should behave. Marklet is 8.7 MB because the text engine is already in macOS, maintained by the people who made the keyboard shortcuts you use.

No accounts, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting service. The App Store build is sandboxed, and it asks for exactly one network permission, used for one thing: if your document points at an http image, that image is fetched so it can be drawn. Nothing else leaves your Mac. See the privacy page.

Those four are the honest gaps, and they are on the list. Raw HTML in a document is not handled at all yet, so it sits there as plain text. PDF works today through the macOS print panel. If one of these is blocking you, the support page goes straight to the developer and it moves up the list.