Marko Editor

Marko Editor is a simple WYSIWYG editor for note taking written in Rust and GTK 4. It uses Markdown as storage format and can read simple Markdown files. However, the main focus of Marko Editor is WYSIWYG note taking and not being a 100% compliant Markdown editor.

Background

Marko Editor is a learning project driven by my personal note taking requirements. Coming from a C++ and Qt background this is my first deeper venture into Rust and GTK. So you should expect some shortcomings in the source code:

• Not (yet) idiomatic in several places.

• Sometimes feature driven with technical dept.

• Incomplete error handling with many unwrap.

Interesting Rust and GTK Parts

While the source code is not perfect, parts of it might serve as examples for GTK 4 development with Rust:

• Clean state management for UI callbacks with macros. Only one connect! call per callback similar to Qt.

• Restoring the window position on X11.

• Dynamic menu content depending on runtime data.

• Communication with UI thread from worker thread via channels - see also MPSC Channel API for painless usage of threads with GTK in Rust

• Structuring of the application for re-use and modularity - see also GTK3 Patterns in Rust: Structure.

Extras for Note Taking

• WYSIWYG editing with clean diffable file format (Markdown with CriticMarkup)

• Colors for special highlights

• Link titles are fetched automatically

• A start page can be defined to access the most important notes right after starting

• Bookmarks to important note documents

• Optional outline for large documents

Development Status

Alpha stage - incomplete, not ready for production.

If you want to use it anyway, these are some of the issues to look out for:

• The undo/redo stack currently doesn't know about the formatting.

• The formatting works currently only on existing text and not directly while typing.

• Restoring the window position is not 100% reliable.

Planned Features

Additional to the known shortcomings, in no particular order and time frame.

• Image embedding (not only image reference editing like currently)

  • Snippet tool (screenshot with crop)

  • Might support Latex formulas

  • Might support additional diagramming tools (PlantUML, Mermaid, ...)

• Knowledge maps (document in document, similar to OneNote)

Building

Linux

• Make sure rust (the latest stable version) and the libs for gtk4 and x11 are installed.

• cargo run to compile and run the program.

• make DESTDIR=package/usr creates the contents for a standard installation on Linux.

• Arch Linux: PKGBUILD is supplied.

• Fedora (Rawhide): dnf install graphene-devel gtk4-devel libX11-devel

License

Marko Editor is distributed under the terms of the GPL version 3. See LICENSE.