Zettlr
From idea to publication in one app: Zettlr accompanies you while writing your blog post, newspaper article, term paper, thesis, or entire book.
What is Zettlr?
Zettlr is a one-stop publication workbench that combines many writing features and collects them in one application. It aims at speeding up your workflow and help you write without any interruptions.
Features:
- Your Notes are your notes: Zettlr is privacy-first
- Citations made easy: Tight and ever-growing integration with your favorite reference manager (Zotero, JabRef, and many others)
- Available in over a dozen languages
- Draft your publications in a professional environment, with LaTeX and Word template support
- Simple and beautiful exports with Pandoc, LaTeX, and Textbundle
- Snippets allow you to automate insertion of boilerplate code
- Themes, dark modes, and full flexibility with custom CSS
- Code highlighting for many languages
- Support for state-of-the-art knowledge management techniques (Zettelkasten)
- A powerful full text search that helps you find anything, anywhere
News
Zettlr releases v3.0: its biggest update so far, with improved features and a new icon
Zettlr Screenshots
Zettlr Features
- Support for MarkDown
- File Tagging
- Live Preview
- Privacy focused
- Ad-free
- Syntax Highlighting
- Dark Mode
- Hierarchical Structure
- No registration required
- Support for scripting
- Support for Themes
- Import CSV Data
- Import/Export OPML Feeds
- Pomodoro Timer
- Built-in viewer
- No Tracking
- Support for LaTeX
- Git Support
- Autocompletion
- Goal Setting
- Lightweight
- Spell Checking
- No Coding Required
- Code Formatting
- Zettelkasten note method
- Multiple export options
- Zotero integration
- Note organization
- Link files
- Built-in themes
- Export to LaTeX
- Sync with Nextcloud
- Interactive tables
- Write files in markdown
- Upload images
- Export to PDF
- Integrated Search
- Fast transactions
- Tasklists
- Export to Word
- Electron based
- Export to HTML
- LaTeX Math
- File Search
Zettlr information
- Developed byHendrik Erz
- LicensingOpen Source (GPL-3.0) and Free product.
- Written in
- RatingAverage rating of 4.2
- Alternatives144 alternatives listed
Supported Languages
- English
- German
- French
- Catalan; Valencian
- Arabic
- Czech
- Danish
- Spanish
- Estonian
- Finnish
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Ukrainian
- Russian
- Portuguese
- Dutch
- Polish
- Romanian
- Turkish
- Swedish
- Vietnamese
- Chinese
GitHub repository
- 8,916 Stars
- 560 Forks
- 345 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Note-taking
- Text Editor
- Writing tool
- File Organizer
- Markdown Editor
- search-tool
- File Manager
- Novel Authoring
- markdown-to-pdf
- markdown-to-html
- organizer
- statistics
- markdown-export
- odt
- docx
Great for taking and organizing notes (better yet if you use Zettelkasten methods). Excellent (really) for writing academic texts which will be converted (with e.g. Pandoc) to PDF or other formats. With Zettlr (plus Zotero or other reference manager exporting library to CSL JSON), citing is incredibly simple: configure where is your citation library, and then just type '@' and it will show ALL your cites for you to choose. Seriously, I wrote my entire Master's thesis on it last year. Images preview, UI theming, all that simple citing, and a program that keeps out of your way to work. It's great, and, best of all, open source. Suggestion of companion open source apps/programs for academic writing:
It's an electron app. If that doesn't bother you, you'll find a pretty good markdown editor in Zettlr. Writing and saving your notes (to-do-lists, personal wiki articles) in markdown means you can access them with any third party text editor if need be. Combine this with Nextcloud's "Notes" and you have your very own OneNote / Google Keep on all your devices.
Too buggy and too quirky.
(1) The undo command does not work. Never.
(2) It writes some changes to the file without your consent. I accidentally deleted a whole column of a table as soon as I opened a document. There was no undoing it and the change was already written to the file on the disk. In an app that has an Undo and a Save command, this must never happen.
This review is for version 1.8.7 on Windows 10.
The following issue was present in version 1.7.4 but has since been resolved: You may end up spending hours writing something that eventually you can neither save nor export! The problem is that sometimes, you issue a "New" command and your command seems to have been succeeded. But in reality, no new file has been created. The app expects you to create a folder first, before creating a file. But since this feature is not properly implemented, the file is not created.
I can’t confirm this for Zettr 1.8.5 on Ubuntu 20.10. Maybe this version runs fine also on Windows 10 (which I don’t have, so that I can’t tell you).
Reply written
I've updated my review for version 1.8.7, but unfortunately, two of three issues still exist on Zettlr for Windows.
While I am very happy for the 1.57% of the world users who have Ubuntu, I am afraid I don't belong to that group.
Reply written
Electron app that is quite buggy and slow compared to similar apps, such as Obsidian or ZimWiki.
I like the idea, just not the implementation yet. It would also be better if you could hide the bold asteriks like other markdown apps, so your page isn't filled with bold ## heading, etc.
Also, the creator/manager makes his politics clear (Marxist). I really don't care about the politics of people, I don't want it in my face.
Best markdown editor I've used
The Vim editing mode has some issues...
The software works well ONLY if you don't need spell-checking It works well with embedded dictionary but CAN'T works with at least Italian, Portuguese, Spain and more
There's no interest in resolve the problem