How good is the Folio notetaking app?

7 April, 2026 - Categories: notetaking apps, blogging, Zola - Tags: Folio, Markdown, front matter

By Steven Rosenberg

Folio is all about Markdown files, yet it's a pretty simple notetaking app.

Will it work for writing Zola and Hugo blog posts?

You can name a file anything you want, and you choose an additional filename upon export to .md. (Don't give it an .md suffix, or you'll get .md.md). I prefer the notetaking app to automatically assume that I want the note's name as the exported file's name while also allowing me to change it, but at least Folio remembers the file name I have chosen if I export the file multiple times, which I do with almost every post I write to either extend it or (much more often) fix errors.

The Markdown rendering is nice. Not all notetaking apps that support Markdown can render it in the app, and render it well. I like a toggle between raw text and rendered Markdown, but it's not a must.

A couple of weird things in Folio that are not deal-breakers are that I can set an internal or external link, but I can't seem to click that link and be taken to its source. It should be something like shift-click, but I can't figure out what works. And if you have a Markdown-coded word at the end of a sentence followed by a period, it's hard to then position your cursor after that period to do an edit. You have to go to the next line and backspace to the real end of the sentence.

Also, I did have an issue where one of my notes kept slightly disappearing. It could have had something to do with two notes beginning with similar names (2026-0403). I renamed one 2026-0402, but this is an issue that I'll need to watch out for and also try to replicate.

And just now my front-matter note seemed to be empty after I copy-pasted its contents into this note. I went to my text file in the GNOME Text Editor and copy-pasted it back into the note. Can I rely on Folio not to eat my notes? I'm not sure just yet.

Folio is very comfortable as a Markdown editor. You don't have to switch modes between Markdown source and rendered Markdown. The markup always renders, and if you want to see the source of an element, clicking on it will show the unrendered markup.

For the purposes of getting my Zola front matter into new blog posts, I have that code in Folio as its own note. I wish there was a way to save as or paste it as a macro. Folio is simple and has neither of those features. So I'll have to open that note and copy/paste its contents into a new one.