What is your preferred novice-friendly markdown editor for academic writing?

[joelostblom]

Poll for everyone who uses markdown for academic writing, which editor do you use and do you think it would be suitable for novices? The key features I think are needed for a novice friendly editor include the following:

• Syntax highlighting support for as much as possible of the pandoc markup.
• Automatic output generation without resorting to the command line pandoc tool.
• The ability to search for and automatically insert citation keys (like the Zotero GoogleDocs plugin).
• Comprehensive documentation for how to use pandoc markdown with the editor (preferably for writing reproducible documents).

The only editor I have found that meets these criteria so far is RStudio (I think, not sure about the citation insertion), which is a great choice, but I am curious if there are others since RStudio is a rather big install if one were to use it just for writing markdown.

[joelostblom]

I should add that these are the ones I have looked at so far (only briefly, please correct if something does not look right):

Name	Syntax	Auto output	Citations	Docs
Brackets	Plugin	N	Plugin	N
Sublime	Plugin	Plugin	Plugin	N
Atom	Plugin	Plugin	Plugin	N
Texts	Y	?	Y	Y
RStudio	Y	Y	?	Y

[QuLogic]

Not sure about citations, but have you tried Ghostwriter?

[joelostblom]

Thanks @QuLogic! Yes, I actually used that myself for a while a few years back (together with abricotine). I remember it being quite nice but I don't think it has citation support or much in terms of documentation for writing academically (I clarified that in my initial comment, I guess one could always point to the Rstudio docs for that since much carries over). I saw that GhostWriter have built-in export support also, nice!

[hueyy]

Have you considered Zettlr?

[joelostblom]

No I haven't seen that one, thanks for sharing! It seems to tick most (maybe all) the boxes, have you had a good experience using it yourself @hueyy ?