Best Markdown Scratchpad

August 25, 2026 · 5 min read

Four small Markdown apps for the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad: Smolpad, Bear, iA Writer and Tot. All four will hold your notes. They disagree about nearly everything else, including what a note is for, where the file ends up, and whether you can open it without them.

I make Smolpad. So here is the case for it, and a fair account of what the other three are for.

Open the folder

Before any feature list, one question.

Can you open the folder your notes are in, right now, without the app running?

Smolpad says yes. So does iA Writer. Both hand you ordinary .md files that any editor on any machine can read.

Bear says no, and gives you a thorough export instead. Tot makes no promise either way, which for seven scratch documents is a fair thing not to promise.

That question is most of the decision. I have written about why I pick the folder side, at more length than belongs here.

What Smolpad does best

Smolpad sits in a gap the other three leave open. It opens like a scratch pad and keeps files like a notes app.

It is already open. Smolpad lives in the menu bar. Record a global shortcut and the panel appears over whatever you were doing, from any app, with no window to hunt for and no dock icon to find. ⌘N starts a new note. Tear the panel off and it becomes a floating window that stays. The gap between having a thought and writing it down is where ideas go to die, and this is the whole reason the app is shaped this way.

Every note is a file you already own. A plain .md file in your own iCloud Drive, or your own Dropbox with Pro, named after the note's first line and visible in Finder and in Files. No database, no container, no export step, because there is nothing to export from. Delete Smolpad tomorrow and the folder is still sitting there with everything in it.

It does not ask you to build a system. There is no vault to configure, no plugin list to curate, no graph to tend. Headings, lists, task lists, links and inline #tags, styled live as you type with the syntax dimmed rather than hidden. Twenty-seven editor themes if you want the room to look different. Press ⌥⌘O and every heading in a long note becomes a table of contents you can click.

You can buy it once. $29.99 outright covers the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad, or $1.49 a month if you would rather. Bear is subscription only. iA Writer is bought once per platform, so the Mac and the iPhone are two separate purchases. And the free tier is the whole editor for your first ten notes, not a crippled version of it.

The short version

Prices checked in August 2026 and quoted in US dollars.

What the others are for

All three are good, and each one is the right answer to a question Smolpad is not asking.

Bear is a complete notes app, and the best looking one here. Nested tags, links between notes, attachments, tables, document scanning. Your notes live in its database and come out through an export. Use Bear if you want one beautiful place for everything and that export button is enough reassurance for you.

iA Writer is a writing app rather than a capture tool. Focus mode, syntax highlighting on your parts of speech, an on-device style check, and the best typography on this list. It runs on Windows and Android too. There is no menu bar panel and no global shortcut: you open it, pick a document, and write. Use iA Writer for drafting the thing, and a scratch pad for the raw material that feeds it.

Tot is smaller than Smolpad, which I do not say lightly. Seven documents, seven dots, nothing to name and nothing to organize, and it is on the Apple Watch. The Iconfactory made it and it shows in every pixel. Seven is the design rather than a limit waiting to be raised. Use Tot if you want a scratch pad and never a notes app.

Not for everyone

Smolpad is Apple only, so if you work across Windows, Linux or Android, iA Writer will meet you there and Smolpad will not. There are no backlinks, no graph and no plugins, so a linked knowledge base wants Obsidian instead. There is no collaboration and no publishing, and your notes are exactly as private as the iCloud or Dropbox account holding them. If none of the four fits, AlternativeTo keeps a longer list, FSNotes and Notebooks among them.

Just pick one

Any of these four will hold your notes better than the app you keep meaning to get around to trying.

The worst outcome here is not choosing the wrong one. It is spending another month comparing while the notes stay in your head, which is the one place they are guaranteed not to survive.

Make a choice. Put a week of real notes in it. Adjust your course if it fights you.

Just don't keep comparing.

← All posts