Oh My Marktext

🔆 A sister fork of MarkText 🌙
Tracks upstream MarkText. Adds notarized macOS builds, git-friendly Light Touch save,
and a handful of affordances for people who write docs alongside developers.
_{Available for Linux, macOS and Windows.}

_{Built on MarkText by Jocs, fxha, Tkaixiang and contributors. All the hard parts are theirs.}

What this is

Oh My Marktext (OMM) is a long-running sister fork of MarkText — same convention as Oh My Zsh to Zsh: track the parent, keep the deltas that matter.

It is not a replacement for MarkText and not a claim that upstream is unmaintained. Upstream does the engine work; this fork carries a small set of packaging and workflow changes that upstream has not adopted. Where a change is generally useful, the goal is to send it upstream as a community PR rather than hold it here.

Current base: MarkText v0.20.0-rc.6

Why it exists

Pillar	What you get	Upstream today
Signed & notarized macOS builds	Non-technical colleagues open the DMG by double-clicking — no Terminal, no xattr -cr	Official builds ship unsigned (notarize: false)
Light Touch save	Open a file, save it, get zero git diff. Edit one paragraph, get a one-paragraph diff	#2189 open; no lightTouch preference
PM ↔ dev UI affordances	Font zoom shortcuts, Style-first paragraph menu, save spinner and dirty indicator	Partial or absent

Coexistence with official MarkText

OMM uses a distinct appId, product name, and user-data directory, so you can install it side by side with official MarkText. Preferences and file associations stay separate. The auto-updater only ever points at this repo's releases — never at official MarkText's update feed.

Screenshot

Features

Everything MarkText does, plus the pillars above:

• Realtime preview (WYSIWYG) and a clean, distraction-free interface.
• Support for CommonMark Spec, GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec and selective support for Pandoc markdown.
• Markdown extensions such as math expressions (KaTeX), front matter and emojis.
• Paragraph and inline style shortcuts.
• Output HTML and PDF files.
• Various themes: Cadmium Light, Material Dark etc.
• Various editing modes: Source Code mode, Typewriter mode, Focus mode.
• Paste images directly from the clipboard.

Light Touch save

MarkText regenerates a document's Markdown from its internal block model on every save. That is correct, but it means opening a file and pressing save can rewrite list markers, blank lines, and trailing whitespace across the whole file — which turns into noisy git diffs in a shared repo.

With Light Touch enabled (Preferences → Editor → File representation), OMM compares the regenerated Markdown against the bytes originally read from disk:

• No semantic change → the original file is written back byte-for-byte.
• Some change → unchanged lines keep their exact original formatting; only edited regions take the regenerated output.

The result is that the diff matches the edit you actually made. Light Touch is on by default in OMM.

Download and Installation

All binaries can be downloaded from the release page.

macOS

The current release requires macOS 12 (Monterey) or later on Apple Silicon. Download oh-my-marktext-mac-arm64-%version%.dmg, open it, and drag the app to Applications. Builds are signed and notarized with a Developer ID certificate, so Gatekeeper lets them run without any Terminal workaround.

On Apple Silicon, you can also install with Homebrew:

brew tap peterjthomson/marktext https://github.com/peterjthomson/marktext
brew install --cask peterjthomson/marktext/oh-my-marktext

The cask uses the signed release DMG. The current release does not include an Intel Mac build.

Windows

Requires Windows 10 or 11. Download and run oh-my-marktext-win-(x64|arm64)-%version%-setup.exe, and choose per-user or machine-wide install.

Linux

Download the AppImage, deb, rpm, snap or tarball from the release page.

Development

OMM tracks upstream's pnpm monorepo layout.

corepack enable
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Useful scripts: pnpm test:unit, pnpm typecheck, pnpm lint, pnpm build:mac.

Upstream's developer documentation applies to the engine and editor internals.

How this fork is organised

OMM keeps its changes as a thin, reviewable layer on top of an upstream tag so that merging the next upstream release stays cheap:

• Light Touch lives in packages/desktop/src/common/lightTouch.ts as a pure module with unit tests — Muya's serialization is not forked.
• Branding, notarization, and CI changes are confined to packages/desktop/package.json, packages/desktop/electron-builder.yml, and .github/workflows/.
• Upstream releases are merged in periodically; see docs/todo/oh-my-marktext-rebase.md for the tracking model.

Contribution

Bug reports for this build belong on this repo's issue tracker. Bugs in the editor engine itself are usually better reported upstream so that everyone benefits.

Credit

Oh My Marktext exists because MarkText is good software. All credit for the editor, the Muya engine, and the 0.20 modernization goes to Jocs, fxha, Tkaixiang, and the MarkText contributors.

If MarkText improves your workflow, please consider sponsoring the upstream project.

License

MIT, same as upstream MarkText.