? Boost Happiness, Productivity and Creativity.Boost Note is an intuitive and stylish markdown editor. It's fully open-source, and used by 1 million developers! The editor and preview dual-pane setup typical of desktop Markdown editors are gone; instead, a singular interface makes for a WYSIWYG experience. This streamlines the workflow and encourages direct manipulation. Remarkable is the best fully featured markdown editor for Linux and Windows. Write Markdown with 8 Exceptional Open Source Editors – recommended Markdown Text Editors. Markdown Here– a useful Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Thunderbird extension that lets you write email in Markdown and render them before sending.
A Windows Minimalist Markdown Editor for Notes and Distraction-free Writing
or download Inspire here for a 10-day free trial.
(Current Version: 3.17.0, Version History)
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Do you sometimes get distracted and disrupted?Inspire helps you cut out distractions and focus on writingMarkdown Editor Windows10
Writing is hard enough, and the blinking icons in the system tray and flashy animations on the browser just make it even harder to stay focused on what you want to say. So your productivity suffers. Inspire is clean, light, and is free from everything that can get in the way of your writing.
Are you tired of slogging through a mess of files and folders to find your work?Inspire manages everything you’ll ever write in one place
How frustrating it is when you just can’t find the file! Inspire organizes and manages all your work in a unified library, be it simple notes, school essays, or daily blog posts, just with an easy search, and voilà, there’s your work. All there’s left for you to do is to focus, and write.
Do you want your work to look good on everything?Inspire’s flexible export meets all your needs![]()
Inspire can easily export your work into gorgeous properly formatted and styled PDFs, Word documents, Markdown files and HTML documents, so you can quickly and easily get your content out into the world. You can also publish to WordPress, Medium and Ghost right from within Inspire. All these are just a click away within a matter of seconds.
Do you get disturbed by the bells and whistles on the editor?Inspire creates a clean, immersive writing environment
Inspire is packed with advanced features that make your writing experience enjoyable. But they stay right out of you way until you actually need them. This is how Inspire creates the clean and elegant writing interface, so you can be free from any distraction.
Are you tired from having to save your work every 5 seconds?Inspire saves and syncs your writing automatically in real-time
Inspire automatically saves your work when you’re writing, so your file will never get lost out of the blue, or even deleted by accident: You can always restore it. Unless, of course, you erase it yourself. It also lets you sync among multiple PCs seamlessly with the help from cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive. You can by all means see the syncing feature an update to the auto-save and backup.
FeaturesOpen Source Markdown Editor Windows
Inspire creates a distraction-free, light markdown writing environment that boosts your productivity. From quick notes to blog posts to great novels, you focus on the content, and Inspire helps with the rest.
Increased productivity
Inspire provides you with a simple yet powerful distraction-free writing environment.
Flexible export
Packed with typography, the flexible multi-format export on Inspire makes your writings look great everywhere.
Multiple types of devices supportMarkdown Editor Windows
Touchscreen support assures you with a smooth scrolling, dragging and dropping experience on devices such as Microsoft Surface products.
Organized files
Inspire provides the file tree panel, so you can manage your files easily.
Real-time cloud sync
Instant auto-save and real-time cloud sync on Inspire make your writing of any kind pleasant and elegant.
What our customers say
I am migrating away from the Mac and I am so glad to have found Inspire Writer for Windows! I was a heavy user of Ulysses on the Mac and I decided to migrate to Windows only after finding your app ? — Aditya
Recently I’ve been working on a similar project, which looks like OneNote but using markdown and could be easily formatted, synchronized among devices, etc. , then I searched the Microsoft Store, and found Inspire just provided everything I wanted.
It’s really fast and easy to use, much better than those apps built on JavaScript, and the only feature I wanted is i18n supported UI . Very impressive software ?, Good job ~~ — Merrick Markdown For Windows
How will you define a distraction-free writing tool? Not too heavy, simple to use, fast. Right? If your answer is yes, still you can stay with Vim and is nothing wrong with this.
The distraction-free writing software is also the look, functionality, and balance which will help you to write more, and it will Inspire you to write more. And merely this is what Inspire does in a very elegant way. — Sebastian
I know that for Mac there is Ulysses, but for Windows I still had not found any at the time, until I found Inspire and it was love at first sight. I downloaded it, installed it, and when I started to write, I fell in love. — Altemberg
Best and most elegant Markdown Editor for Windows
When I was an iPad user, I made use of Ulysses App for my writing process, means writing the first draft of a short story, novella or even a novel. Over the past years I found some Markdown-Editors for Windows but not a single one could convince me as much as the Inspire Writer, which unfortunately I found far too late. I always was looking for an elegant, yet stable and usable Markdown-Editor and with Inspire Writer, I got so much more: Auto save, Markdown-highlighting, document management, tagging, all done by shortcuts on the keyboard so I never need to put my hands from the keyboard. The GUI is simple and elegant and offers a distraction free environment that keeps me focused on that, what I really want to do: Writing.
Contact and support to and from the team easy, fast and very helpful, the team is happy about ideas from their customers. I really can and will recommend this fresh and crisp Markdown-Editor to everyone, who wants to focus on text and wants to have a big bunch of export functions, as well as direct publishing from within Inspire Writer to WordPress and Medium. — Peter Nathschläger After years of searching, I’ve discovered what your incredible team has succeeded in doing – taken away the one last incentive for me to keep using my Mac. As a longtime Ulysses fan, it was the one reason that I kept from making the leap back into the world of Windows that I had left so long ago. You’ve nailed it. In fact, I have to admit that I actually like Inspire-writer more than Ulysses. It’s elegant and the amount of work you’ve put into it is obvious. — Tom Ficarotta
* All testimonials are from the Trustpilot, G2 or users email content with granted permission.
Download Inspire here for a 10-day free trial.
(If you are using Windows XP, please download the Installer for XP)
See our news and plans on Inspire Blog.
Learn more about Inspire and distraction-free writing on our Knowledge Base.
Contact us: [email protected].
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages.
Using Markdown is different than using a WYSIWYG editor. In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Markdown isn’t like that. When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.
For instance, to denote a heading, you add a number sign before it (e.g.,
# Heading One ). Or to make a phrase bold, you add two asterisks before and after it (e.g., **this text is bold** ). It may take a while to get used to seeing Markdown syntax in your text, especially if you’re accustomed to WYSIWYG applications. The screenshot below shows a Markdown file displayed in the Atom text editor.
You can add Markdown formatting elements to a plaintext file using a text editor application. Or you can use one of the many Markdown applications for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems. There are also several web-based applications specifically designed for writing in Markdown.
Depending on the application you use, you may not be able to preview the formatted document in real time. But that’s okay. According to Gruber, Markdown syntax is designed to be readable and unobtrusive, so the text in Markdown files can be read even if it isn’t rendered.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Why Use Markdown?
You might be wondering why people use Markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor. Why write with Markdown when you can press buttons in an interface to format your text? As it turns out, there are a couple different reasons why people use Markdown instead of WYSIWYG editors.
Kicking the Tires
The best way to get started with Markdown is to use it. That’s easier than ever before thanks to a variety of free tools.
You don’t even need to download anything. There are several online Markdown editors that you can use to try writing in Markdown. Dillinger is one of the best online Markdown editors. Just open the site and start typing in the left pane. A preview of the rendered document appears in the right pane.
You’ll probably want to keep the Dillinger website open as you read through this guide. That way you can try the syntax as you learn about it. After you’ve become familiar with Markdown, you may want to use a Markdown application that can be installed on your desktop computer or mobile device.
How Does it Work?
Dillinger makes writing in Markdown easy because it hides the stuff happening behind the scenes, but it’s worth exploring how the process works in general.
When you write in Markdown, the text is stored in a plaintext file that has an
.md or .markdown extension. But then what? How is your Markdown-formatted file converted into HTML or a print-ready document?
The short answer is that you need a Markdown application capable of processing the Markdown file. There are lots of applications available — everything from simple scripts to desktop applications that look like Microsoft Word. Despite their visual differences, all of the applications do the same thing. Like Dillinger, they all convert Markdown-formatted text to HTML so it can be displayed in web browsers.
Markdown applications use something called a Markdown processor (also commonly referred to as a “parser” or an “implementation”) to take the Markdown-formatted text and output it to HTML format. At that point, your document can be viewed in a web browser or combined with a style sheet and printed. You can see a visual representation of this process below.
Note: The Markdown application and processor are two separate components. For the sake of brevity, I've combined them into one element ('Markdown App') in the figure below.
To summarize, this is a four-part process:
From your perspective, the process will vary somewhat depending on the application you use. For example, Dillinger essentially combines steps 1-3 into a single, seamless interface — all you have to do is type in the left pane and the rendered output magically appears in the right pane. But if you use other tools, like a text editor with a static website generator, you’ll find that the process is much more visible.
What’s Markdown Good For?
Markdown is a fast and easy way to take notes, create content for a website, and produce print-ready documents.
It doesn’t take long to learn the Markdown syntax, and once you know how to use it, you can write using Markdown just about everywhere. Most people use Markdown to create content for the web, but Markdown is good for formatting everything from email messages to grocery lists.
Here are some examples of what you can do with Markdown.
Websites
Markdown was designed for the web, so it should come as no surprise that there are plenty of applications specifically designed for creating website content.
If you’re looking for the simplest possible way to create a website with Markdown files, check out blot.im and smallvictori.es. After you sign up for one of these services, they create a Dropbox folder on your computer. Just drag and drop your Markdown files into the folder and — poof! — they’re on your website. It couldn’t be easier.
If you’re familiar with HTML, CSS, and version control, check out Jekyll, a popular static site generator that takes Markdown files and builds an HTML website. One advantage to this approach is that GitHub Pages provides free hosting for Jekyll-generated websites. If Jekyll isn’t your cup of tea, just pick one of the many other static site generators available.
Note: I used Jekyll to create the Markdown Guide. You can view the source code on GitHub.
If you’d like to use a content management system (CMS) to power your website, take a look at Ghost. It’s a free and open-source blogging platform with a nice Markdown editor. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll be happy to know there’s Markdown support for websites hosted on WordPress.com. Self-hosted WordPress sites can use the Jetpack plugin.
Documents
Markdown doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of word processors like Microsoft Word, but it’s good enough for creating basic documents like assignments and letters. You can use a Markdown document authoring application to create and export Markdown-formatted documents to PDF or HTML file format. The PDF part is key, because once you have a PDF document, you can do anything with it — print it, email it, or upload it to a website.
![]()
Here are some Markdown document authoring applications I recommend:
Tip:iA Writer provides templates for previewing, printing, and exporting Markdown-formatted documents. For example, the 'Academic – MLA Style' template indents paragraphs and adds double sentence spacing.
Notes
In nearly every way, Markdown is the ideal syntax for taking notes. Sadly, Evernote and OneNote, two of the most popular note applications, don’t currently support Markdown. The good news is that several other note applications do support Markdown:
If you can’t part with Evernote, check out Marxico, a subscription-based Markdown editor for Evernote, or use Markdown Here with the Evernote website.
Books
Looking to self-publish a novel? Try Leanpub, a service that takes your Markdown-formatted files and turns them into an electronic book. Leanpub outputs your book in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI file format. If you’d like to create paperback copies of your book, you can upload the PDF file to another service such as Kindle Direct Publishing. To learn more about writing and self-publishing a book using Markdown, read this blog post.
Presentations
Believe it or not, you can generate presentations from Markdown-formatted files. Creating presentations in Markdown takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot faster and easier than using an application like PowerPoint or Keynote. Remark (GitHub project) is a popular browser-based Markdown slideshow tool, as is Cleaver (GitHub project). If you use a Mac and would prefer to use an application, check out Deckset or Marked.
If you send a lot of email and you’re tired of the formatting controls available on most email provider websites, you’ll be happy to learn there’s an easy way to write email messages using Markdown. Markdown Here is a free and open-source browser extension that converts Markdown-formatted text into HTML that’s ready to send.
Documentation
Markdown is a natural fit for technical documentation. Companies like GitHub are increasingly switching to Markdown for their documentation — check out their blog post about how they migrated their Markdown-formatted documentation to Jekyll. If you write documentation for a product or service, take a look at these handy tools:
Flavors of Markdown
One of the most confusing aspects of using Markdown is that practically every Markdown application implements a slightly different version of Markdown. These variants of Markdown are commonly referred to as flavors. It’s your job to master whatever flavor of Markdown your application has implemented.
To wrap your head around the concept of Markdown flavors, it might help to think of them as language dialects. People in Ciudad Juárez speak Spanish just like the people in Barcelona, but there are substantial differences between the dialects used in both cities. The same is true for people using different Markdown applications. Using Dillinger to write with Markdown is a vastly different experience than using Ulysses.
Practically speaking, this means you never know exactly what a company means when they say they support “Markdown.” Are they talking about only the basic syntax elements, or all of the basic and extended syntax elements combined, or some arbitrary combination of syntax elements? You won’t know until you read the documentation or start using the application.
If you’re just starting out, the best advice I can give you is to pick a Markdown application with good Markdown support. That’ll go a long way towards maintaining the portability of your Markdown files. You might want to store and use your Markdown files in other applications, and to do that you need to start with an application that provides good support. You can use the tool directory to find an application that fits the bill.
Additional Resources
There are lots of resources you can use to learn Markdown. Here are some other introductory resources:
Take your Markdown skills to the next level.
Learn Markdown in 60 pages. Designed for both novices and experts, The Markdown Guide book is a comprehensive reference that has everything you need to get started and master Markdown syntax.
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