> A native macOS note-taking app that feels like Ghostty — GPU-accelerated, keyboard-first, monospace, zero-config.
I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.
Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.
Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.
I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.
Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.
There’s nothing wrong with showing markdown unrendered, but it’s odd to claim it was “meant to be” unrendered.
“Every note app eventually dies. When it does, your notes should survive. Plain .md files will outlive every app, every company, every format war.”
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense — it’s still a format being rendered, otherwise I may as well use notepad.
And are they really proposing that we ought to read italics and *bold* like this?
Edit: Oops. Looks like HN has formatted bold/italics for me. Italics should be bracketed with one asterisk and bold bracketed with two asterisks.
> Every feature we didn't build is time you spend writing.
Also, I feel that this kind of marketing language rubs me the wrong way (perhaps also that it feels LLM-ish). How is you not adding features saving me time? Maybe it saves you time...
To be honest, other than both of them allowing you to write markdown, they're not comparable.
Obsidian is the current favorite of the "make a second brain" crowd which is based the concept of a Zettelkasten [1]. There are thousands of plugins to customize Obsidian to turn it into whatever you want. It just so happens to use Markdown files to store your notes. It's a very powerful tool, but it's overkill for most people who want to write a few notes in Markdown.
Ghost isn't about wiki links, plugins, hypertext, Zettelkasten stuff.
It's just for writing, which I think is fine. Not everyone wants or needs all of whiz bang features of Obsidian or Notion or Microsoft Word.
Regarding that previewing isn't included; it's not a big deal in reality.
The Notes app that comes with macOS can import markdown files and render them. There a hundreds of apps, utilities, plugins, websites that enable a user to render a markdown file. For most people, that wouldn't be ideal; I get it.
(Aside: at a user group meeting, I saw a developer coding something in Vim with no syntax highlighting. I had never seen that before. He said he liked it better that way. Not everyone likes the same things.)
There's a great app from indie developer Brett Terpstra called Marked [1] that was created to preview markdown files. It has tons of features, all centered around previewing markdown files. I've been a satisfied customer of Marked for years.
We all use certain apps for certain things even if we have other options; sometimes it's for aesthetic reasons or we just like how a particular app "feels" when we use it.
If people enjoy using Ghostmd, that's great.
But also it says: "Raw markdown. No preview pane. That's the point."
So I guess it's intentionally more primitive than notepad, if that's a thing you want?
The idea of showing raw Markdown with just a few colors and maybe some bold/italic variations is compelling, but what about tables? Tables in Markdown can be very useful, but also a pain to type out/format manually.
Auto-save on every keystroke sounds good, but wouldn't that hammer the underlying storage too much for no reason?
And the installation instructions continuing the unfortunate trend of `curl | bash` doesn't help..
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On the topic of Markdown editors, what are the current recommendations (primarily for Linux)? Obsidian is a crowd favorite, but it seems too heavy if I want to only open a single file, especially outside of any vault. Something to preview/edit `README.md` files would be nice.
There are other suggestions at https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1023abr/what_is_the_...
Date paths should use at least a double digit numerical index so they are naturally ordered when sorted lexicographically. Numbers also give you i18n for free (assuming Gregorian calendar of course, but it seems that's what this non configurable tool does here).
Why not a TUI app ? I don't really want a second terminal that only does one thing...
Next week I’m going to build Ghostty for vacation writing.
But I think what’s really going to be huge is Ghostty for text!
I recently created a Go application for myself after not finding a note-taking application I liked. Instead of implementing an editor, the application just creates the `%Y-%m-%d.md` file and then opens it in my preferred editor. I have other features, but in the end, all it does is create files or pipe data into the editor I want to use.
journal # opens 2026-03-07.md in vim
journal yesterday # opens 2026-03-06.md in vim
journal weekly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 07.md into vim
journal monthly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 31.md into vim
journal monthly last month # pipes 2026-02-01 – 28.md into vim
It fits my needs perfectly. It removes the friction of note taking. It's easy to backup, search, convert the notes. If I want to use another editor like a WYSIWYG markdown editor, it's trivial to change.
> "GhostMD" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.
I suspect this is a signing or notarization error.
How can you even call a program a markdown editor if it does not even render markdown?
Somebody updated it; it's now called MacDown 3000 [1].
[1]: https://macdown.app