Zettlr is free and open source Markdown application designed for academic writing. It provides a lot of powerful tools to help you write academic texts right out of the box.

The application’s stated goal is simple: “Enabling researchers of arts and humanities, e.g. those people without any knowledge of coding, to finally free themselves from software that costs hundreds of dollars and pave the way into an Open Source era. This would be only fitting, given the fact that especially in political science and sociology, cries for Open Access journals are on the rise. So here’s what Zettlr is all about: It wants to be serious competition for word processors.”

Zettlr editor interface

See the Zettlr Documentation for the official documentation. Zettlr itself implements a mixture of different dialects. The editor itself highlights only GitHub Flavored Markdown plus some extra elements which extends Markdown syntax with Zettelkasten elements. You can also add LaTeX-commands.

Zettlr Markdown Support

Zettlr provides support for the following Markdown elements.

ElementSupportNotes
HeadingsYes
ParagraphsYes
Line BreaksYesIn addition to trailing whitespace, you can also use a trailing backslash or press the Return key once to achieve the same result.
BoldYes
ItalicYes
BlockquotesYes
Ordered ListsYes
Unordered ListsYes
CodeYes
Horizontal RulesYes
LinksYes
ImagesYes
TablesYes
Fenced Code BlocksYes
Syntax HighlightingYes
FootnotesYes
Heading IDsPartial
Definition ListsNo
StrikethroughYes
Task ListsYes
Emoji (copy and paste)Yes
Emoji (shortcodes)No
HighlightNo
SubscriptNo
SuperscriptNo
Automatic URL LinkingYes
Disabling Automatic URL LinkingNo
HTMLUnknown
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