typora vs Zim

Typora immediately renders what's typed on the screen in Markdown format. This helps users to have a better understanding of how their document is being formatted.

The editor and preview dual-pane setup typical of desktop Markdown editors are gone; instead, a singular interface makes for a WYSIWYG experience. This streamlines the workflow and encourages direct manipulation.

It supports LaTeX expressions, with an easy-to-use MaxJax panel.

It supports GFM's code fences, with syntax highlight support for C/C++, java, etc.

Typora has clean yet beautiful built-in themes and allows for users to create new themes using CSS.

It supports tables for Markdown Extra. And also provides a GUI to make it easy to insert and edit them.

It won't display image like ![alt](http://image-url), But shows the image content inside the editor.

It supports an outline for the document, by showing a table of contents on the left side of the screen.

Currently works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Editing in Markdown, either in WYSIWYG mode or in markdown code mode, feels natural. It never gets in the way.

Use fenced code-blocks to render diagrams using syntax from Mermaid and FlowChart.js.

You can open any folder in sidebar and see a list of other markdown files.

Notes can contain links to other notes, allowing you to reference important information when needed. This way the user can connect and reference many different pages in the app, keeping things clean and structured, unlike Evernote, which makes this a good Evernote alternative.

If/when the app is no longer developed (or if the user simply decides to no longer use the application or view/edit it on a non-supported platform), this can still be done with any plain-text editor.

Zim will automatically create a folder structure that fits your page hierarchy and adds/removes files such as images to/from appropriate folders.

Zim supports HTML, LaTeX, Pandoc Markdown, and RST. This allows ones documents to be easily used in a wide selection of other apps.

Windows, Linux, and BSD are supported with their own clients. This is nice for those that use multiple operating systems but still want to use the same app on each.