Your notes are text files. That's it.
*A note-taking app that gets out of the way.*
## Why plain markdown?
Every note app eventually dies. When it does, your notesshould survive. Plain .md files will outlive every app,
every company, every format war.- No database migrations
- No export button needed
- grep works. git works. Everything works.
- **Your files. Your disk. Your rules.**
See [the repo](https://github.com/...) for more.
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Comments
Im touched that “Ghostty but for X” is a marketing point but what does it mean in this case? I thought this might be based on the architecture I did for Ghostty. But it’s not. Or it might be full native UI, but it’s not (it’s GPUI). Not trying to be rude or unappreciative but as the creator of Ghostty here… what do you mean?
By shervinafshar 2026-03-081:181 reply Github[1] page says it's intended to "feel" like Ghostty:
> A native macOS note-taking app that feels like Ghostty — GPU-accelerated, keyboard-first, monospace, zero-config.
By pixelready 2026-03-081:26 I’m curious about the overlap between people that want a keyboard driven experience, but also would prefer a Mac-native GUI rather than a TUI or a vim / emacs distro. Seems like a very narrow audience to aim for.
By apaprocki 2026-03-0811:52 Welcome to the club. It’s like when people say “Bloomberg Terminal for X”. You just can’t really say anything because everyone knows it’s not Ghostty, based on it or will ever be it, but it’s about the vibe… and if you then chase after them, it only serves as free advertising :)
By baby 2026-03-085:29 same kind of keyboard shortcuts, feels the same
> Markdown is already beautiful. We don't render it. We don't preview it. You read it raw, the way it was meant to be.
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.
By akerl_ 2026-03-081:33 I would agree with this. Markdown by definition is a markup language that’s designed to be easily read/written and also rendered.
There’s nothing wrong with showing markdown unrendered, but it’s odd to claim it was “meant to be” unrendered.
By stingraycharles 2026-03-081:49 You’re reading too much into the AI generated prose. Just a little bit later they say about “why raw markdown”:
“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.
By Slow_Hand 2026-03-082:16 Agreed. I want my h1’s to be larger than my h2’s. That visual distinction is how I parse data faster. Flat markdown with no formatting feels like it’s missing the point of Markdown.
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.
This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian, which is my go-to "notes app which is just a bunch of markdown files stored to your computer"? I very much like Obsidian, and as I understand it they are your direct competitor, so some indication of how you want to distinguish your app from theirs would be great if you want to compel me to switch. :)
> 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...
> This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian,
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.
By johnfn 2026-03-096:32 Obsidian doesn't "just happen" to use Markdown - the entire point of the app is that it writes to markdown. The URL is literally http://obsidian.md. The "notes save to your filesystem" is a concept directly lifted from Obsidian. Saying they're "not comparable" just doesn't make sense.
By dd8601fn 2026-03-081:04 It says "no electron". I guess that's a differentiator.
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?
By baby 2026-03-085:30 I wrote this because I can't stand obsidian, I want something opinionated with good defaults and that's not overly sensitive
By riffic 2026-03-082:10 Obsidian is not libre, at the very least. This repo purports the project to be MIT.
