MarkText Native for Windows

Native Windows x64 builds of MarkText, compiled from MarkText's unchanged source with NativeBoat. The executable runs without Chromium, WebView2 or Node.js.

Download a build from the releases page.

Compared with the Electron build

MarkText v0.20.0 native release, built with NativeBoat v0.1.0-alpha.2, against the official Electron build (marktext-win-x64-0.20.0):

Metric	Electron	Native	Change
Download (ZIP)	166.0 MB	88.5 MB	47% smaller
Installed folder	458.7 MB	274.9 MB	40% smaller
Files on disk	108	23	79% fewer
Time to window	794 ms	150 ms	5.3× faster
Time to open a document	1,427 ms	1,018 ms	29% faster
CPU time to start	2.17 s	0.89 s	59% less
CPU when idle	0.21%	0.00%	100% less
Processes	5	1	80% fewer
Memory (working set)	461.3 MB	279.8 MB	39% less
Memory (private bytes)	296.0 MB	207.9 MB	30% less
Threads	112	8	93% fewer
Handles	2,205	227	90% fewer

Measured on Windows 10 22H2 with an Intel Core i7-8750H and 8 GB of RAM, opening a short Markdown file. Each figure is the median of three runs. Memory, threads and handles are summed over all of the app's processes, 15 seconds after the document opened; idle CPU is averaged over the next 10 seconds.

How it is built

The Build native MarkText workflow:

1. checks out a MarkText tag (default v0.20.0) from marktext/marktext,
2. sets up Node.js and pnpm, which NativeBoat uses to install the project's dependencies,
3. compiles packages/desktop with the NativeBoat Build action (@v1),
4. uploads a ZIP of the full output folder and its SHA256SUMS.txt as a workflow artifact. The executable needs the other files in that folder, so it is not published on its own.

The Release native MarkText workflow runs that build and publishes it as a new release. Each release is tagged with the MarkText tag plus a build number (v0.20.0.1, v0.20.0.2, ...), so a rebuild, for example with a newer NativeBoat, never replaces an earlier release.