Notelane vs emdee

Write in markdown and see your formatting come to life as you type — headings, bold, italic, links, code blocks, checklists, and more — all rendered inline. Your files. Your folders. Your way. Notelane works directly with the files on your device. On first launch, pick any folder — local storage, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any connected cloud provider visible in the Files app. Your notes stay as standard .md files, fully portable and never locked in. Write with clarity A distraction-free editor with live formatting that renders your markdown as you type. No toggle between "edit" and "preview" — just write. Store notes anywhere Pick any folder on your device or in the cloud. Notelane works with iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or any storage provider visible in the Files app. Connect your thinking Link notes together with [[wikilinks]] and organize with #tags to build your own personal knowledge base — no complex setup required. Stay in control Revision history lets you restore previous versions of any note. PDF export and sharing are built in. A trash bin keeps deleted notes recoverable. Organize your way Nested folders, pinning, and tag-based filtering keep everything tidy. A clean sidebar puts your entire library one tap away. Note statistics Word count, character count, paragraphs, and estimated reading time — always available at a glance. Your writing deserves a home that respects simplicity. Notelane is that home.

A .md file from an AI chat, full of # and **. A browser can show it to you. emdee lets you rewrite it — in that same clean, formatted view. You don't need to switch between a reading mode and an editing mode. You edit the document while it stays clean and properly formatted, exactly as a .md document should look. Headings stay heading-sized, tables stay tables, and you type directly into the document. Want bold? Select the text and tap the button. You never type the symbols, and you never see them. Save, and it's still a plain .md file. ■ When you'd use it You saved an AI answer as .md — now you want it in your own words, not just readable AI drafted your travel plan or checklist — now the dates and details need to be yours You want to keep notes and minutes in .md, without looking up syntax as you write ■ What you can actually edit "emdee" is not a viewer — it's a true WYSIWYG Markdown editor. All of this works right in the formatted view: Headings (six levels), bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, links Bullet lists, numbered lists, and checklists you can tick with a tap Block quotes, code blocks, horizontal rules Tables: insert with one button, and add or delete rows and columns from that same button's menu. Line breaks inside cells are supported Find and replace — Replace All comes back with a single undo It all sits in the format bar along the bottom, which rises with the keyboard so you can change formatting mid-sentence ■ Images An image in the same folder as the document you have open is drawn right there in the text. So is one in a folder below it. PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and SVG are drawn. So are images on the web (https://) HEIC — what an iPhone camera writes — is not drawn. Export it as JPEG and it is The first time, emdee asks permission to read that folder — one button, and it never asks again Anything it cannot draw shows its path in a frame instead The image button on the format bar puts one in. An image from outside the document's folder is copied into that folder first, and a file of the same name is never overwritten. What gets written is a relative path, so hand the images over along with the document. Exported HTML and PDF have the pictures embedded, so they travel on their own. The  in your file is not touched by any of this. ■ More features Table of contents — tap a heading to jump there. On iPad it opens as a column beside your text instead of covering it Print, and export to PDF, HTML, or plain text. Lines break on paper exactly where they break on screen, and tables never split mid-row across pages Light, dark, or follow the system Body text can follow the system text size or stay at a size you choose, and the line width is yours: fit the screen, or match A4 print ■ What you write stays a .md No proprietary format, no importing. The file you have open is the .md itself, opened in place where it lives — no copy is made. It saves back readable by GitHub, VS Code, Obsidian — anything. Even details like line breaks inside table cells are written the standard way, as an HTML br tag. Line endings (LF / CRLF / CR) and text encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, and legacy encodings such as Shift_JIS) are preserved exactly as the file was opened. Files made on Windows keep their format intact. ■ One purchase — iPhone, iPad, and Mac The same document, on the same page layout, wherever you open it. ■ What emdee doesn't do File management belongs to the Files app, and sync belongs to iCloud Drive. There is no proprietary notes database and no cloud service. The only thing open is your .md file. Images are looked for inside the folder your document is in, and nowhere else. A reference pointing outside it (../ or an absolute path) is not drawn, and neither are HEIC, AVIF or TIFF files, or images over roughly 8 MB (24 MB per document). Anything that cannot be drawn shows its path in a frame instead. Questions and bug reports are welcome — see the support page.