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Developer Documentation#

1. Project Setup#

1.1 Pre-Requisites#

  • Python (>= 3.12)

  • Node.js (>=20.19.0) — the PR build CI uses Node 22.21.1, the release CI uses Node 24.14.1; any version meeting the minimum should work

    • Using versions significantly newer than the Electron-bundled Node may cause issues compiling native add-ons

  • A lot of patience

1.2 Linux Specific Pre-requisites#

1.3 Windows Specific Pre-requisites#

  • You will need Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022 (Scroll all the way to the bottom)
    • Additionally, you need spectre-mitigated MSVC, go to "Individual Components" and select "MSVC ... - VS2022 C++ Spectre-Mitigated Libs"
    • Many native libraries do not support ClangCL well yet, hence we force it to use MSVC in our .npmrc (pnpm respects this file)

1.4 Clone and Install#

bash
git clone https://github.com/marktext/marktext.git
cd marktext
pnpm install

1.5 Create minified locale files#

  • This is automatically ran when building for production, but not for dev for performance
plaintext
pnpm run minify-locales

1.6 Run in Development#

bash
pnpm run dev

1.6.1 Some Points to Note:#

  • The main and preload processes are NOT automatically hot-loaded on edit, you need to reload the development process on each edit unfortunately
    • The good news is Vite bundles it really really quickly so it shouldnt be too big of a hassle
  • Although the renderer process is hot-loaded, loss of states can often lead to weird errors. I recommend doing a full reload if this happens
  • Compile targets:
    • main and preload still compile to CommonJS
    • renderer is ESModules only (take note when using any legacy CommonJS libraries)

1.7 Build for Production#

bash
# For windows
$ pnpm run build:win
 
# For macOS
$ pnpm run build:mac
 
# For Linux
$ pnpm run build:linux

2. Sub-sections#