Last Updated on March 4, 2026
Rucola is a terminal-based markdown note manager to view statistics, explore connections and launch editing and viewing applications. It’s fast and responsive especially on older hardware.
Rucola provides easy access to edit notes in your favorite terminal text editor such as vim, emacs or helix, thus allowing a far more powerful editing interface.
Rucola relies on an external program to view HTML versions of your markdown notes, allowing more customizability (for example with the rich plugin system of browsers) as well as more conformity to your usual workflow.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Present users of a zettelkasten-like note system of interlinked markdown files with high-level information and statistics about their notes. A Zettelkasten or card file consists of small items of information stored on Zettels (German: ‘slips’), paper slips or cards, that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing
- Show the same information about filtered subsets of notes, as well as their relation with the entire note set.
- Allow the user to view and follow links and backlinks of a single note to see connections within their note graph.
- Allow the user to make small edits such as renaming or moving notes from within the application.
- Provide easy access to a powerful, external text editor for editing notes.
- Optionally compile notes to HTML-documents, including LaTeX compilation and code highlighting, on the fly and show them in an external viewer.
- Provide all of this functionality from within a terminal user interface.
Website: github.com/Linus-Mussmaecher/rucola
Support:
Developer: Linus Mußmächer
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Rucola is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials
Related Software
| Markdown Editors | |
|---|---|
| Mark Text | Simple and elegant Markdown editor |
| Zettlr | Billed as the Markdown editor for the 21st century |
| CodiMD | Realtime collaborative markdown notes |
| MindForger | Thinking notebook and Markdown editor |
| MarkFlowy | Modern and intelligent Markdown editor |
| ghostwriter | Distraction-free Markdown editor |
| ReText | Supports Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages |
| Apostrophe | Distraction free Markdown editor |
| StackEdit | Full-featured Markdown editor based on PageDown |
| PanWriter | Distraction-free Markdown writing environment |
| Looksyk | Simple personal knowledge platform |
| Remarkable | Python-based editor with live preview, MathJax support and more |
| Folio | Markdown note-taking app for GNOME |
| Scratchmark | Organized Markdown editor |
| Rucola | Terminal-based markdown note manager |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor built for desktop |
| ThiefMD | Markdown and Fountain editor and file manager inspired by Ulysses |
| Marker | Simple yet robust Markdown editor |
| Marknote | Create rich text notes |
| Notes-Up | Write beautiful notes fast and easy using Markdown |
| Norka | Continuous text editing |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |