Developer Documentation

1. Project Setup

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

Linux environments require additional dependencies, please see Linux Specific Pre-reqs

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)

bash

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

This is automatically ran when building for production, but not for dev for performance

pnpm run minify-locales

bash

pnpm run dev

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)

bash

# For windows
$ pnpm run build:win

# For macOS
$ pnpm run build:mac

# For Linux
$ pnpm run build:linux