Marknote 1.6 WYSIWYG Note-Taking App Adds Initial Support for Sub-Folders

Marknote 1.6, the latest stable release of KDE’s open-source WYSIWYG note-taking application, arrived in May 2026 bringing a set of user-requested improvements that meaningfully expand its organisational capabilities. Coming two and a half months after Marknote 1.5, this release introduces initial sub-folder support, command bar note search across all notebooks, emoji support in notes, and an optional background blur effect for the editor.

Marknote occupies an interesting position in the KDE application ecosystem: it is designed to be a modern, visually clean note-taking application with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing experience that stores notes as Markdown files on disk — giving users both an accessible interface and the portability and version control compatibility of plain-text file storage. Version 1.6 addresses one of the most common structural complaints about the application: the inability to organise notes within notebooks using folder hierarchies.

1. What Is Marknote?

Marknote is a KDE application for creating, organising, and editing notes using a WYSIWYG Markdown editor. It was introduced as a new KDE application in 2023 and has been progressing steadily through feature additions that address the practical needs of daily note-taking.

The application’s core design principle distinguishes it from many alternatives: notes are stored as standard Markdown (.md) files in a user-specified directory. This means your notes are not locked into a proprietary database or cloud service — they can be read and edited with any text editor, committed to a git repository, synced via any file synchronisation service (Nextcloud, Syncthing, rclone), and processed by standard command-line tools. The WYSIWYG editing experience sits on top of this plain-text foundation, providing rich formatting controls without requiring users to write Markdown syntax manually.

Who Uses Marknote?

Marknote targets KDE Plasma desktop users who want a notes application that feels native to their desktop environment, offers good formatting options without a complex interface, and keeps their data in portable Markdown files. It competes in a space occupied by Joplin, Obsidian, Logseq, Notesnook, and GNOME Notes — each with different approaches to the fundamental trade-offs between local storage, cloud sync, formatting richness, and organisational capability.

2. Initial Sub-Folder Support

The most significant structural change in Marknote 1.6 is initial support for sub-folders within notebooks. In previous versions, Marknote’s organisational model was flat within each notebook: you had notebooks at the top level, and notes within each notebook, with no ability to group notes into folders within a notebook.

For users with small note collections, this was workable. For users building a second-brain-style knowledge base with hundreds or thousands of notes across multiple projects, the flat structure became a significant limitation. A developer using Marknote for project documentation needed one notebook per project to avoid a chaotic flat note list — and with dozens of active projects, the notebook list itself became unwieldy.

How Sub-Folders Work in 1.6

Sub-folder support in Marknote 1.6 is described as “initial” — reflecting that the implementation is functional but not yet feature-complete in terms of sub-folder management operations. What is available:

• Creating sub-folders — right-click within a notebook to create a sub-folder, or drag existing notes into a sub-folder
• Nesting notes in sub-folders — notes can be placed in sub-folders, which appear as expandable items in the notebook’s note list panel
• Filesystem mapping — sub-folders map directly to subdirectories in the notebook’s directory on disk, maintaining Marknote’s philosophy of portable, plain-file storage
• Navigation — the left panel shows the sub-folder hierarchy with expand/collapse controls

What is not yet implemented (but expected in future releases based on the roadmap): drag-and-drop reordering of sub-folders, sub-folder renaming via the GUI, and recursive search within a specific sub-folder.

Impact on Organisational Workflows

The addition of sub-folders enables several organisational patterns that were previously impractical in Marknote:

• Project-based organisation — one notebook per domain (Work, Personal, Research) with sub-folders per project
• Zettelkasten-adjacent structures — sub-folders for inbox, permanent notes, literature notes, and project notes
• Meeting notes hierarchies — sub-folders by quarter or month within a “Meetings” notebook
• Technical documentation — sub-folders by component or subsystem within a project documentation notebook

3. Command Bar Cross-Notebook Search

Marknote 1.6 adds the ability to search for notes across all notebooks from the command bar. The command bar — a keyboard-invoked overlay that provides quick access to actions and navigation — now includes a note search mode that queries note titles and content across every notebook simultaneously.

Using the Command Bar Search

The command bar is invoked with Ctrl+K (or the equivalent KDE keyboard shortcut configured in settings). In Marknote 1.6, typing in the command bar triggers a real-time search across all notes, displaying matches sorted by relevance with the matching notebook shown alongside each result. Selecting a result navigates directly to that note.

Previously, search in Marknote was scoped to the currently selected notebook, requiring users who couldn’t remember which notebook contained a specific note to search each notebook individually. Cross-notebook search is a fundamental usability improvement for anyone managing a growing note collection spread across multiple notebooks.

Search Scope and Indexing

The search covers note titles and note content. The search is performed against the Markdown source of each note, meaning that formatted text, code blocks, and lists are all searchable. Results are displayed with a content snippet showing the matched text in context.

The search implementation in 1.6 is file-based rather than indexed — each search reads note files on disk rather than querying a pre-built full-text index. This keeps the implementation simple and avoids database synchronisation issues, but may become slower as note collections grow to thousands of notes. Future versions may introduce indexing for performance.

4. Emoji Support in Notes

Marknote 1.6 adds the ability to add emojis to notes. This is accessible through the formatting toolbar (an emoji picker button), through the command bar (type : followed by an emoji name for quick insertion), or through the operating system’s emoji input mechanism (Ctrl+. on most Linux desktops).

Emojis are stored as Unicode characters in the Markdown source files — they are fully portable, render consistently across operating systems, and work correctly with any text editor or Markdown renderer. For users who use emojis to visually categorise notes (🔴 urgent, ✅ complete, 💡 ideas), this integration brings Marknote in line with Notion, Obsidian, and other popular note-taking applications that have had emoji support for years.

Emojis are particularly useful in note titles and sub-folder names for quick visual scanning of note lists — a 🐛 prefix on bug notes or a 📋 prefix on meeting notes makes the list much faster to navigate than text-only titles in a long list.

5. Optional Background Blur Effect

Marknote 1.6 adds an optional background blur effect for the editor area. When enabled in settings, the editor background uses a frosted-glass blur effect rather than a solid colour or transparent background. This aesthetic feature — familiar from KDE Plasma’s compositor effects applied to other application windows — makes Marknote feel more integrated with the KDE Plasma desktop’s visual design language.

The blur effect is implemented through KWin (KDE’s window manager/compositor), requiring KDE Plasma with compositing enabled. It is an optional setting, defaulting to off, and has no functional impact on note editing. Users who prefer a cleaner, distraction-free editing environment can ignore it entirely.

The background blur is one example of Marknote’s increasing attention to the aesthetics of the editing experience — earlier releases added smooth transitions and improved typography rendering; this release adds the compositor-integrated blur that makes Marknote visually cohesive with the rest of the Plasma desktop.

6. Marknote’s WYSIWYG Markdown Editor

Marknote’s WYSIWYG editor is built on KDE’s QTextEdit with custom Markdown rendering that displays formatted output in the editing view rather than showing raw Markdown syntax. This differs from “rich text mode” editors like LibreOffice Writer, which convert Markdown to a binary format; Marknote’s underlying file remains plain Markdown text that can be read in any editor.

Supported Formatting

The WYSIWYG editor in Marknote 1.6 supports:

• Headings (H1 through H6) with immediate visual rendering
• Bold, italic, strikethrough, and inline code
• Ordered and unordered lists with proper indentation
• Fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting for common languages
• Blockquotes
• Hyperlinks (clickable in preview mode)
• Images (embedded or linked)
• Tables (basic)
• Horizontal rules

The toolbar provides buttons for all common formatting operations, and keyboard shortcuts follow standard conventions (Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italic, etc.). For users who know Markdown, typing syntax directly in the editor also works — **bold** will render as bold text immediately, # Heading will display as an H1 heading, and so on.

7. Marknote vs Other Note-Taking Apps on Linux

Marknote’s strongest advantage is its native KDE integration and pure-Markdown file storage with no database layer. For KDE Plasma users who already use Nextcloud or Syncthing for file sync, Marknote integrates with that infrastructure transparently — the notebook directory can be placed in the synced folder and Marknote’s notes appear on every device where Nextcloud or Syncthing is configured, with no additional setup.

8. Installation Guide

# KDE Neon / Kubuntu — recommended for KDE applications
sudo apt install marknote
# or via Discover: search "Marknote"

# Arch Linux / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S marknote

# Fedora KDE Spin
sudo dnf install marknote

# OpenSUSE
sudo zypper install marknote

# Flatpak (universal, all distributions)
flatpak install flathub org.kde.marknote

# openSUSE OBS (latest KDE packages)
# See: software.opensuse.org/package/marknote

9. KDE Integration and the Wider KDE PIM Ecosystem

Marknote is developed as part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, which includes Kontact (unified PIM client), Kmail (email), Korganizer (calendar), Akregator (RSS reader), and Kaddressbook (contacts). While Marknote is currently a standalone application rather than a Kontact component, its KDE-native implementation means it integrates naturally with the Plasma desktop’s theming, shortcut system, and global menu bar.

The Marknote development team has indicated interest in deeper KDE PIM integration in future versions — particularly the ability to link notes with calendar events (associating meeting notes with calendar entries), contacts (linking notes to Kaddressbook entries), and tasks (KDE’s Korganizer task integration). These features would position Marknote as a more complete personal knowledge management tool within the KDE ecosystem.

Conclusion

Marknote 1.6 is a focused release that delivers meaningful organisational improvements to KDE’s most promising native note-taking application. Sub-folder support resolves the most common structural limitation of earlier versions, cross-notebook command bar search makes finding notes faster regardless of collection size, and emoji support brings a small but frequently requested quality-of-life improvement. The optional background blur is a nice aesthetic touch that reinforces Marknote’s KDE-native identity.

For KDE Plasma users who value portable plain-text storage, native desktop integration, and a clean WYSIWYG editing experience, Marknote 1.6 is the most compelling release to date. The roadmap indicates continued progress on sub-folder management, deeper KDE PIM integration, and performance improvements for large note collections — making Marknote an increasingly viable alternative to commercial note-taking applications for Linux-first users.