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.

Element Support Notes
Headings Yes
Paragraphs Yes
Line Breaks Yes In addition to trailing whitespace, you can also use a trailing backslash or press the Return key once to achieve the same result.
Bold Yes
Italic Yes
Blockquotes Yes
Ordered Lists Yes
Unordered Lists Yes
Code Yes
Horizontal Rules Yes
Links Yes
Images Yes
Tables Yes
Fenced Code Blocks Yes
Syntax Highlighting Yes
Footnotes Yes
Heading IDs Partial
Definition Lists No
Strikethrough Yes
Task Lists Yes
Emoji (copy and paste) Yes
Emoji (shortcodes) No
Highlight No
Subscript No
Superscript No
Automatic URL Linking Yes
Disabling Automatic URL Linking No
HTML Unknown
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