I have noted that I use the Ghostwriter markdown editor to draft all of my New Leaf Journal articles and other writing. I wrote a comprehensive review of Ghostwriter in October 2021. My Ghostwriter review has been a solid, albeit unspectacular performer here according to our privacy-friendly local analytics statistics. For that reason, I was somewhat surprised when it had its best month in terms of visitors by a wide margin in October, coming in as our third most-read article. I only just learned that Ghostwriter, which had previously been created and maintained by a GitHub user who goes by wereturtle, was acquired by KDE in September. Its GitHub repository and website are, sure enough, now owned by KDE.
KDE is one of the major players in Linux, running the popular KDE Plasma desktop environment and a large number of apps. I used KDE Plasma as my daily driver desktop environment from August 2020 through July 2021 (my July 2021 change led to an interesting Ghostwriter issue). The Ghostwriter handover appears to have gone through without any disruption, evinced by the fact that despite using Ghostwriter on a daily basis, I only learned that it is now a KDE app more than one month after the change.
From my perspective, the move seems like a good thing. KDE constitutes something close to “corporate backing” in the free and open source Linux space, and it is good to know that there will be money behind my favorite writing tool. I do hope that Ghostwriter never acquires the dependency requirements that many of the KDE-suite applications carry with them (I do not use KDE Plasma on any of my devices at the moment), but so far all seems well. From KDE’s perspective, this is a terrific application and I hope that it allows many more people (primarily KDE users) to discover an excellent markdown editor for writers. Although I only run Linux, I would like to see Ghostwriter become more accessible for Windows and MacOS users.
I have no reason to update the substance of my Ghostwriter review since my thoughts (and Ghostwriter) remain relatively unchanged from October 2021. However, I have updated the review to reflect that Ghostwriter is now a KDE application.
I conclude by expressing my gratitude to the creator and original maintainer of Ghostwriter, wereturtle, for releasing it to the public, all without so much as asking for donations. I hope KDE maintains it well into the future.