In the next article we are going to take a look at Apostrophe. This is a free and open source Markdown editor for Gnu / Linux. It is a distraction-free editor with a minimal and clean interface. The program has a preview function. This function will format the markdown commands automatically.
Some other important features are previewing images, links, footnotes, equations, and exporting the markdown document to a file. It also comes in light / dark mode, focus mode, spell checking, document statistics, and more than 18 languages supported.
In Apostrophe we will be able to configure up to five different variants of Markdown. These are; Github-flavored Markdown, Pandoc Markdown, MultiMarkdown, CommonMark and Plain Markdown. Supports full-width, half-width, half-height, and windowed views. It will also allow us to synchronize views and automatically hide the header bar. This program uses pandoc as a backend for Markdown analysis and offers a very clean and elegant user interface with which you can work very comfortably.
In case there is still someone who does not know, say that markdown is a plain text format syntax, which was created by John Gruber in 2004. This language offers the benefits of plain text, and provides a convenient format for writing on the web, but is not intended to replace HTML. Markdown is a write format, not a post format.
General characteristics of Apostrophe
- The program has different types of views; full width, wide, half height and with window. We can also use the full screen mode (F11).
- It also offers spell check.
- In the program we will find available the document statistics. Toggle between the number of characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs.
- This editor will give us the possibility to use the Hemingway mode. This disables backspace and eliminates the ability to use certain keys, forcing the user to type rather than edit the document.
- We can use the focus mode, with which only the current text around the cursor will be highlighted while the rest is dimmed.
- This software has a live preview functionality where we will see the document compiled in real time. We can access the live preview function with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + P.
- It has the find and replace option, as well as including the option to replace all matches.
- It will also allow us drag and drop images in the document.
- Supports 5 Markdown variants; Pandoc Markdown, CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, and Plain Markdown.
- apostrophe handles font size dynamically.
- It will give us the option of export documents to multiple formats such as PDF, ODT, Word and HTML.
- We can also use keyboard shortcuts to work more comfortably with the program.
- We will have the option of using a dark mode.
Install Apostrophe on Ubuntu 20.04
Apostrophe is available as a package file flatpack. We will need to have this technology enabled in our system, so if you don't have it yet, you can continue The Guide that a colleague wrote on this blog a while ago.
When we already have the possibility of installing flatpak on our system, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the following install command:
flatpak install flathub org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe
After installing the Apostrophe markdown editor, we can now look for the program launcher on our computer or in the terminal execute this other command:
flatpak run org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe
uninstall
For remove this program from our Ubuntu 20.04 computer, we just need to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute in it:
flatpak uninstall org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe
Apostrophe combines a good Markdown editor with distraction-free writing, seeking comfort during the user's work. For more information about this program, users can on request the page on GitHub From this project.