ghostwriter

If you are not already familiar with it, Markdown is a novice-friendly markup language characterized by its easy-to-read syntax. It was designed to help users write and format text using a simple set of instructions, while also making it easy to publish content on the web.

ghostwriter takes advantage of this language to provide you with a distraction-free writing platform suitable for editing blog posts, papers, novels or various other projects. It offers an impressive set of features and a minimalistic, customizable UI.

It goes without saying that the application offers support for syntax highlighting, but it also includes several other features that other Markdown editors lack. For instance, it provides you with shortcuts for adding various syntax elements, allows you to drag and drop images and can export documents to HTML, Word, ODT, PDF and more, provided the right Markdown processor is installed.

A live HTML preview of the document can be brought up at any time, and a custom style sheet can be added to see how everything would look on your own website. However, some users may have preferred the HTML preview to be displayed in the same window.

As is usually the case with Markdown editors, ghostwriter is designed to help you avoid distractions while working on your projects. To this end, you can enable the "Focus" mode, which fades everything except the current sentence, line or paragraph.

The app also comes with a built-in spell checker, and there are plenty of dictionaries to choose from. You can ease navigation and keep track of various document statistics by enabling the optional HUDs.

Another interesting feature is the “Hemingway” mode, which prevents you from deleting any words after they have been typed and can help you learn to avoid errors.

By default, the application includes only two UI variants: the classic white one and a darker alternative. However, you can also create new themes and customize pretty much everything about them, such as the text and background color, UI style and opacity.

If you want to create a truly distraction-free workspace, you can switch to full screen mode. The title bar and menu bar are removed when doing so, leaving only the contents of your document for you to focus on.

Writers who are looking for a Markdown editor have plenty of applications to choose from, but ghostwriter is a piece of software that we feel is definitely worth your attention. It offers pretty much everything you could expect from a Markdown-based text editor, and the fact that it is entirely open source certainly helps.