Disclosure: I work on Notula, which is the last section of this article. Everything before it is about the category.
A WYSIWYG Markdown editor hides the syntax. Live preview shows it twice, and most of the tools called WYSIWYG are the second kind. The difference is small when you are checking how something renders, and large when you are writing.
What it means
A WYSIWYG Markdown editor shows you the formatted document while you type, instead of the syntax that produces it. No hashes in front of headings, no asterisks around bold, no pipes in tables. You see a heading, and the file on disk contains ## Heading.
WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get", which came from word processors in the 1980s and means something more specific here: the editing surface and the rendered document are the same surface. There is no second pane, and there is no moment where you are looking at the raw text.
The distinction the term rests on
The alternative is live preview: raw Markdown in one pane, the rendering in another, scrolling together.
StackEdit, Dillinger and Markdown Live Preview are all live preview, and all three are good at it. They open in a browser, they need no install, they sync to Drive and Dropbox, and for pasting something in and seeing how it renders they are hard to beat. If that is what you came for, use one of them and stop reading.
The difference matters when you are writing rather than checking. In a live preview editor you are always reading the version with the syntax in it, because that is the pane your cursor is in. The rendering is a reference. In a WYSIWYG editor there is no such pane, so a table looks like a table while you edit it and a heading looks like a heading.
There is a third thing worth naming, because it gets called WYSIWYG and is not quite: inline preview, where the syntax is hidden except on the line the cursor is on. It is much closer, and the flicker on the current line is the tell.
Which editors are which
Genuinely WYSIWYG. Typora is the one that established this way of working and is still the cleanest version of it, for a single person writing prose. MarkText is the open-source answer to it and is free.
Inline preview, usually called WYSIWYG. Obsidian's Live Preview mode hides the syntax except where the cursor is. Obsidian is a far better personal knowledge base than anything else on this page, with backlinks, a graph and years of plugins, and if that is what you need the question of what its editor is called does not matter much.
Live preview. StackEdit, Dillinger, Markdown Live Preview, HackMD, and VS Code with its preview pane open. Toast UI Editor ships both modes and lets you switch.
Not a Markdown editor at all, although it turns up here: Quill and similar rich-text libraries are components for building an editor into your own application, and they produce HTML rather than Markdown.
| Editor | Editing surface | Runs on | Price | Comments on a passage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typora | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows, Linux | $14.99 | No |
| MarkText | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free, MIT | No |
| Obsidian | Inline preview | Desktop and mobile | Free | No |
| StackEdit | Live preview | Browser | Free, open source | Yes, into the file |
| Dillinger | Live preview | Browser | Free, open source | No |
| HackMD | Live preview | Browser | Free tier | Yes, on their server |
| VS Code | Split preview | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free | Only in a pull request |
| Notula | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows | Free | Yes, beside the file |
Checked against each project's own pages on 19 August 2026. The last column is the one Notula was built for, which is why it is filled in honestly for everybody else: StackEdit and HackMD both have comments, and the two editors that match us on editing surface have none.
What is still hard, even in a WYSIWYG editor
Hiding the syntax solves the easy half. Three things stay hard, and they are worth checking before you pick.
Tables
A pipe table is the single most unpleasant thing to edit by hand in Markdown, and it is where a WYSIWYG editor earns its place: adding a column should be adding a column. Check that the file it writes back is still an ordinary table and not something only that editor can read.
Diagrams
A mermaid code block is a wall of arrows and brackets in every editor that treats it as code. Drawing it in the document is a different experience from previewing it beside the document.
The diff
This is the one nobody checks and the one that causes arguments. An editor that hides the syntax still has to write the syntax back, and many of them reformat the whole file to do it: every line rewrapped, every table realigned, and a one-word change arriving as a two-hundred-line diff that nobody can review. If the files are in git, ask this question first.
Questions people search for alongside this one
Is there a WYSIWYG Markdown editor for VS Code?
Not really. VS Code renders Markdown in a preview pane beside the file, and the extensions that advertise WYSIWYG either open a separate webview or hide the syntax only on the lines your cursor is not on. The editing surface is still the raw text, which is what makes VS Code excellent for a file you are treating as source and awkward for a document you are treating as writing.
Which WYSIWYG Markdown editors are free?
MarkText is free and MIT-licensed, and it is the closest free equivalent to Typora, which costs $14.99 after a fifteen-day trial. Obsidian is free, and its editor is inline preview rather than WYSIWYG. Notula is free with no account. Between them that is most of the category: there are very few paid products in this space.
Is Obsidian a WYSIWYG Markdown editor?
Not exactly. Obsidian's Live Preview hides the syntax everywhere except the line the cursor is on, which is inline preview - much closer to WYSIWYG than a split pane, and recognisable by the flicker as the caret moves through a heading. Obsidian is also a far better personal knowledge base than anything else on this page, and if that is what you want, what its editor is called does not matter much.
Does a WYSIWYG editor change my Markdown file?
Some of them do. Hiding the syntax means writing the syntax back on save, and many editors reformat the whole file to do it - rewrapping every line, realigning every table - so a one-word change arrives as a diff nobody can review. If your files are in git, ask this before you ask anything about the interface.
Where Notula fits
Notula is a real WYSIWYG editor, and besides that a git-integrated collaborative tool: comments and notifications, as you do in Google Docs.
It is for docs as code - the documentation that already lives in a git repository. No syntax on screen at any point, the cursor line included, with tables you edit as tables and Mermaid diagrams drawn in the document. It opens the repository as a tree of documents rather than a list of files, and it adds the thing none of the editors above have: comment threads on a passage, with replies and resolve, committed beside the document rather than written into it.
On the diff question, since it is the one that matters in a repository: the round trip is byte-identical across 6,000 real documents, and an edit leaves 96.4% of blocks untouched.
It is closed source, it is macOS and Windows with Linux still to come, and everyone who comments needs the repository and a desktop. If those are fine, it is free.
