MarkText 0.20.0 is now at Release Candidate 7 — please help us test it 🎉

This is the biggest internal change MarkText has had in a long time: the entire editor engine has been rewritten from the ground up. After several rounds of beta testing, we've reached the seventh release candidate (RC 7) for 0.20.0. We're almost there — one more round of real-world testing before the stable release.

👉 Download: https://github.com/marktext/marktext/releases/tag/v0.20.0-rc.7
(Windows · macOS · Linux — installers for all platforms are attached to the release.)

⚠️ macOS users: the build is unsigned. After dragging MarkText to Applications, run this once in Terminal so macOS will open it:

xattr -cr /Applications/marktext.app

What's new in RC 7

RC 7 rolls up 10 changes since RC 6:

• 🖼 A real viewer for diagrams (Better Mermaid Diagram Tools in Marktext #4363, [Feature] Support image-viewer interactive controls (zoom in/out, pan, lightbox) for Mermaid diagrams #5508): every diagram block now offers a view action on its hover toolbar. It opens the diagram full screen where you can zoom, pan and fit it to the window — and save it as SVG or PNG, or copy it straight to the clipboard. Exports carry their labels and paint their own background, so a saved diagram reads the same on a white page as it does in the editor
• ✍️ Emphasis now pairs the way CommonMark says (support nested emphasis delimiters #2086): *a *b* c* and **a **b** c** render as nested emphasis instead of the old "first closer wins" behaviour
• 🔗 Link destinations follow CommonMark too (inline link rendering is not Common Mark compliant #2377): a bare destination containing a space is literal text, [a](<b c>) keeps its pointy brackets out of the href, and destinations with \) escapes resolve like they do on export
• 🪟 Each window keeps its own menu bar (odd behavior for menu bars in main win vs prefs box #2245): on Windows and Linux, focusing Preferences no longer strips the menu bar off the editor window behind it (and vice versa)
• 📐 Sequence-diagram arrowheads survive PDF export (Arrows in sequence diagram missing when export to PDF #2423): they were pointing at the editor's hidden copy of the diagram, so lines printed without them
• ↩️ Hard line breaks no longer cost a line (newline glyph consumes entire line #2094): the trailing-space marker is drawn out of flow, so a line that reaches the margin wraps exactly as it would with no marker shown
• 🎨 Code blocks are legible again (问题与建议 #5539) — the desktop themes colour them through a selector the new engine did not emit — and editor text keeps its grayscale antialiasing on macOS (revert: keep grayscale antialiasing on editor text (#5539) #5558)
• 🔎 Stepping through search results is much faster (Find Next / Find Previous re-renders every matching block on each step #5580): only the two blocks whose match changed are redrawn, instead of every block containing a match

⚠️ Upgrading from RC 4 or earlier? The math options in Preferences › Markdown were renamed in RC 5, so a stored value from before is dropped. If you had formula rendering switched off, it comes back on — switch it off again there.

Why a rewrite?

The old editor core had grown hard to maintain and was the root of many long-standing bugs. The new engine was rebuilt to be faster, more reliable, and easier to keep improving.

What you should notice

• Smoother editing, especially in large documents. When you type, the editor now updates only the part that actually changed instead of redrawing more than it needs to — so typing and scrolling in long notes stays responsive.
• More reliable and predictable. The new core is strictly type-checked, has a large automated test suite, and is checked against the official CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown standards — so how your markdown is parsed and saved is more consistent.
• Your files stay intact. Opening a markdown file and saving it back preserves your content faithfully, including reference links, footnotes, and front matter.

Features you can try

• ✍️ Headings, lists, quotes, code blocks (with syntax highlighting), tables, links, images
• ✅ Task lists with clickable checkboxes (option to auto-move finished items to the bottom)
• 🔢 Math with KaTeX — inline $...$ and block $$...$$
• 📊 Diagrams — Mermaid, flowchart, sequence, PlantUML, and Vega-Lite charts
• 📝 Footnotes and reference-style links/images
• 🧾 Front matter (YAML / TOML / JSON)
• 🔠 Super/subscript, emoji picker (: to trigger)
• #️⃣ Optional code-block line numbers
• ⚡ Slash / quick-insert menu and block drag handle
• 🎯 Focus mode, search & replace (regex / case / whole-word)
• 🌍 UI available in 12 languages

Please help us test these areas 🙏

These are the spots most likely to still have rough edges — if you use MarkText heavily, testing here is gold:

• Lists & indentation — nested lists, mixing lists with quotes, Enter/Backspace in empty items, task-list toggles
• Copy & paste — pasting from Word / Google Docs / web pages, and pasting tables
• Undo / redo — after fast typing, after switching tabs, across different block types
• CJK / IME input — Chinese / Japanese / Korean typing, especially with auto-pair brackets/quotes
• Arrow-key navigation — moving at the very start/end of the document and across block boundaries
• Formatting across blocks — bold/italic/code spanning blockquotes or multiple list items
• Large documents — open a big note and check typing/scrolling stays smooth
• Math & diagrams — rendering and editing
• Diagram viewer & export — open a diagram with the new view action, zoom/pan, and save it as SVG / PNG or copy it
• Emphasis & links — nested */_ emphasis and link destinations written the CommonMark way
• Export — HTML / PDF output looks right

A note on bugs

This is a release candidate — it should be close to final, but you may still run into bugs or rough edges, and that's exactly what we're hoping you'll help us find. If something looks wrong, please report it (details below).

How to report a problem

Please open a new issue (one issue per problem) and include:

1. MarkText version: 0.20.0-rc.7
2. OS & version (e.g. Windows 11, macOS 15, Ubuntu 24.04)
3. What you did — step-by-step to reproduce
4. What you expected vs what happened
5. A small markdown sample that triggers it, plus a screenshot or short screen recording if you can

Thank you for helping make 0.20.0 solid for everyone! 💙