I got tired of every Markdown editor out there, so I built my own

It started with a simple need: a Markdown editor that works offline, opens fast, and doesn’t ask me to create an account. I tried five or six apps. None of them were quite right.

Typora is beautiful — easily the best writing experience of the bunch — but it’s paid. Not expensive, but I wanted something I could install on any machine without thinking about licenses. Notion is powerful but cloud-dependent; cut the internet and it’s basically a spinner. Obsidian brings an entire plugin ecosystem with it, and I’d spend an hour configuring before writing a single word. VS Code with extensions? That’s a tank run to the grocery store.

I wanted an editor that just opens and works. No account, no subscription, no internet required.

Why Tauri and not Electron

The first question when picking a stack: how do you render the UI? Electron is the obvious answer. It’s also how you end up with a 200 MB binary and 300 MB of RAM usage for a text editor. That felt absurd to me.

Tauri uses the system WebView — WebKitGTK on Linux, WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS — with a Rust backend. The result: the final binary is under 10 MB and startup is instant. The frontend is React, because I know it well and didn’t want to reinvent that particular wheel.

How it started

Version one could open a file, edit it, and save it. Markdown preview came on day two. Then I wanted a formatting toolbar. Then a file history panel. Then I looked up and realized I was on feature number five — and that I’d been using the app myself every day without thinking about it.

That’s the classic pet project trap: you build a tool for yourself, and it grows exactly in the direction of your own pain points.

The feature I’m most proud of: version history

This is the thing I’d always wanted and never found in a lightweight editor. Not git. Not manual copies named draft_v2_final_FINAL.md. Just automatic snapshots that happen on their own — every time you open a file, and periodically while you work.

Every version is stored locally. You can browse them, preview any snapshot, and restore with one click. No cloud involved, no setup required.

It’s the kind of feature that saves you a few times a year at exactly the wrong moment — when you’ve accidentally deleted a section, closed the file, and only noticed an hour later.

A few other things worth mentioning

PDF export via typst. Not browser print, not wkhtmltopdf — typst generates a properly typeset PDF styled to match your current theme. Dark theme open? You get a dark PDF. Light theme? Light PDF.

OCR directly into your note. Drop an image, run OCR via tesseract, and the text is appended straight into the document. No copy-pasting between windows.

Keyboard shortcuts that work on any layout. Sounds minor until it isn’t. Most apps only register shortcuts on the English layout. qnote handles any layout — including Cyrillic, Arabic, whatever you’re using.

Synchronized scroll in split view. Source pane and preview pane scroll together. Obvious in theory, surprisingly rare in practice.

Where it ended up

qnote isn’t trying to replace Obsidian or compete with Notion. It’s for people who want to just write: no plugins to configure, no account to manage, no subscription to forget about. Markdown with live preview, file history, autosave, version snapshots, PDF export, OCR — everything you actually need, nothing you don’t.

Runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Binary under 10 MB. No internet required.

It’s open source: github.com/Omibranch/qnote — and available on the AUR if you’re on Arch.