Typora
I like editing markdown as markdown for a lot of things, but for anything longer or more document-like, I want to see it the way it’ll actually read — headers as headers, bold as bold, not a page of asterisks and pound signs. Typora is a WYSIWYG markdown editor: you type in markdown, but it renders live as you go, so a ## heading just looks like a heading immediately instead of staying as literal characters until some separate preview step.
I didn’t go looking for Typora specifically — I landed on it. I’d been trying to get something WYSIWYG-ish working in VS Code first, and someone pointed me at a particular keyboard shortcut that was supposed to toggle into a rendered view. It just didn’t work for me. After enough fighting with that, I gave up and went looking for a dedicated tool instead, and that’s how I found Typora.
Once I was there, the price is what made it easy to commit to. It’s a one-time purchase — around $15 for a handful of devices (three to five, depending on the license), no subscription, license good for life. People have pointed out there are easier or free ways to just view rendered markdown, and that’s true — but for something I open constantly, $15 for permanent use across every device I own is an easy yes for me personally. I’d rather pay once for a tool I like than manage a subscription for one I merely tolerate.
The one real complaint I have is copy-paste consistency. Select a section in the WYSIWYG view, hit Ctrl-C, paste it somewhere else with Ctrl-V — and the result isn’t predictable. Sometimes it pastes with the actual formatting intact, the way it looked in Typora. Other times the exact same action pastes the raw markdown syntax instead, asterisks and all, as if it never rendered in the first place. There’s no obvious pattern I’ve found to when it does one versus the other, which is the frustrating part — it’s not that either behavior is wrong on its own, it’s that I can’t predict which one I’m going to get.
I’ve mostly just adapted around it rather than solved it: when I know I’m going to be pulling content out of a document to paste elsewhere, I’ve gotten in the habit of asking Claude to give me the output as HTML instead of markdown up front, so I’m not relying on Typora’s clipboard behavior cooperating at the moment I need it to.
That’s a real annoyance, but not one that’s made me regret the purchase. Everything else about actually writing in it has been solid enough that the clipboard quirk is a workaround-and-move-on issue rather than a dealbreaker.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece was provided by Claude (Anthropic). This account describes a personal experience using the software; the analysis and opinions are my own.