Blink is a Markdown editor for GNOME, written in Rust with GTK 4 and libadwaita. It shows a document as source, as rendered text, or both side by side, and it keeps unsaved work safe: a file is saved as you type, unsaved changes are backed up for recovery after a crash, and a change another program made to the file is never overwritten without asking.
The preview renders tables, task lists whose boxes can be ticked, footnotes, GitHub's alerts, emoji, collapsible details, typeset math, syntax-coloured code blocks and images from the document's own folder. Find works in the source and in the rendered text, replace in the source. Documents open in tabs, which can be dragged out into windows of their own, or each in a window of its own if you prefer. A folder opened in Blink lists its Markdown files, and those of the folders below it, in a sidebar. There is a focus mode, full screen with nothing but the text, and an export to a standalone HTML file or to PDF.
Fedora 44, 45 and Rawhide, from the Copr project sachesi/software:
sudo dnf copr enable sachesi/software
sudo dnf install blink
openSUSE Tumbleweed and Slowroll, from the OBS project
home:sachesi:software; for
Slowroll the address has openSUSE_Slowroll in it, and on aarch64 openSUSE_Factory_ARM:
sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:sachesi:software.repo
sudo zypper install blink
Debian testing, from the same OBS project; Ubuntu 26.04 has an older Rust than Blink needs:
sudo install -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/Debian_Testing/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/sachesi-software.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/sachesi-software.gpg] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:sachesi:software/Debian_Testing/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sachesi-software.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install blink
Arch Linux: the AUR package blink-markdown, built from
packaging/aur/PKGBUILD, which each release tag updates.
The same packages are attached to each release.
just build
sudo just install # or: just prefix=$HOME/.local build install
Build needs Rust 1.95, blueprint-compiler, just, gettext and the development
packages for GTK 4.20, libadwaita 1.8 and GtkSourceView 5, or newer. Details, other
prefixes and removal are in docs/installing.md.
- Installing
- Using Blink, with the keyboard shortcuts and the settings
- Contributing, including where things are in the code, and reporting a vulnerability
The interface is available in English and Ukrainian.
GPL-3.0-or-later.