Writing & editing
Altretta's editor is a live-preview Markdown editor: you write plain Markdown and it formats as you type, straight into .md files on your disk. No proprietary format, no save button, no separate edit/preview toggle — and every edit quietly becomes a signed entry in your vault's history.
If you've written in Obsidian or Logseq, this will feel like home: the same Markdown, wikilinks, embeds, callouts, tags, and properties you already know. This section is the table-stakes tour — the everyday craft of writing and editing notes.
Everything here works entirely offline against local files. What makes it Altretta is what happens around your writing: changes are written to disk as you go and recorded in a cryptographically signed history, so you can travel back through a note's recent versions and prove exactly what changed and when.
In this section
The editor & reading mode
Live preview, a clean reading mode, tabs and split panes, pop-out windows, and the Outline panel.
Markdown syntax
Headings, bold and italic, lists, task lists, code, quotes, tables, and footnotes.
Links & embeds
Wikilinks [[ ]] with autocomplete and aliases, embeds ![[ ]], and external links.
Callouts, math & diagrams
Callouts with > [!note], KaTeX math, and Mermaid diagrams rendered inline.
Tags & properties
#tags anywhere and typed YAML frontmatter properties, edited in the Properties panel.
Canvas
An infinite spatial canvas to arrange notes, cards, drawings, and connections freeform.
Slides & presenting
Turn a note into a slide deck and present straight from your Markdown.
Composing notes
Assemble longer documents from embeds, sections, and reusable pieces.
Tabs, panes & workspaces
Tabs, split panes, pop-out windows, and saved workspace layouts.
Two habits worth forming
- Just write and link. Don't organize up front. Type your thoughts, drop
[[wikilinks]]between them, and let the graph, backlinks, and search surface the structure that emerges. - Reach for the slash menu. Type
/anywhere to insert a heading, a callout, a query, or an AI prompt without leaving the keyboard.
Next steps
- Start with The editor & reading mode to learn how the writing surface works.
- New to Markdown? Jump to Markdown syntax.