Season of KDE 2026: My journey with Marknote

Hey everyone!

I am Siddharth Chopra, a second year engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. I'm really excited to be working on Marknote as a part of the Season of KDE program this year, under the mentorship of Carl Schawn.

Marknote, as it is aptly named, is KDE's own markdown based note taking app. The aim of my project is to improve Marknote by adding the much requested source mode, alongside other enhancements.

Progress so far

3 weeks into the project, I have been successful in adding a working source mode functionality to the editor. When source mode is activated, the contents of the source markdown file are allowed to be edited directly, instead of showing the rendered markdown. This is incredibly useful, in cases where the user needs manual control over the contents of the note, or in case there is some glitch in the rendering (which unfortunately still happens often).

Demo Video

Technical Roadmap & Challenges

The main editor of Marknote comes from the file EditPage.qml. As part of my initial approach, I added a global property here to check if source mode was enabled, and then conditionally changed components of this editor. Although this worked, but it brought along some of its own issues. First of all it made the code unnecessarily complex. It also meant that components like the formatting bar now needed to be repurposed to work with source mode, which is a challenge in itself.

So, my mentor suggested to move the raw editor into a new file, to keep the code maintainable. This led to the original EditPage being split into RichEditPage and RawEditPage. Similarly, the respective backends were also split in two, as the needs of both the editors are significantly distinct.

Additionally, I had to consider specially the source mode for images. Because when loaded, image URL's are not kept intact, instead they are replaced with a hash, that maps to the image in memory. Also, the editor internally uses html for rendering images, which I also had to convert back to markdown for source mode.

And someone who is not a designer by any means, deciding the form and placement of the mode toggle button was in itself a mini lesson in UI design ;) Initially I went with a toggle switch. But when I shared that for feedback, I learnt that a checkable button is the ideal UI element here.

Future Plans

My proposal mentions features apart from the source mode, which I plan to complete. While working on the current feature, I noticed multiple bugs in the app, which I intend to fix as well.

Overall experience

It has been a great experience working with the KDE community, and really exciting to be able to contribute to an app that so many users around the world use every day! I would also like to express my gratitude towards my mentor, for being there for whatever issue I faced!