Zettlr

Zettlr is a Markdown editor for Mac built for academic and long-form writing. It is led by Hendrik Erz, it is free, and it is paid for by donations.

You write in Markdown and decide how much formatting renders inline, from plain code to an almost rich-text view. Citations come from Zotero, JabRef and Juris-M, with more than 9,000 citation styles. Export runs through Pandoc, LaTeX and Textbundle, with LaTeX and Word template support, and presentation profiles target reveal.js, Beamer and PowerPoint. LaTeX math is rendered in the editor.

For notes, Zettlr supports a Zettelkasten workflow with note IDs, wiki-style internal links, related files and a graph view. It also has full-text search, snippets with variables and tabstops, code highlighting, dark mode and custom CSS. It suits students, researchers and writers who need citations and journal-ready exports from Markdown.

Zettlr does not force cloud sync and has no telemetry. Its only network call is the update check, which you can turn off. It is licensed under GPL-3.0, needs macOS 13 or later, and has separate builds for Apple silicon and Intel.