Oooh, I hadn't noticed iA Writer for Windows got out of beta! I too prefer their app for mobile Markdown editing. I messed around with Typora for a long time, but it is just slightly too cumbersome to customize IMO. I currently use Visual Studio Code for my notes, which is not as unsuitable as it sounds. But I really dig the iA's Focus mode, so I'm gonna probably buy software again like it's 2011. My journaling is part of my Markdown notes system - I wrote a small Python script to generate one .md file for each month of this year, with a date-formatted header for every day in that month.
Yeah, I liked Typora at first, but it's kind of shady from a licensing standpoint (it's free until it's not), and Electron makes stuff clunky as fuck. A text editor shouldn't take 150MB of RAM. I haven't touched the iA desktop apps. It seems like they could be nice, but honestly there are a lot of free programs that do at least as much (if not more). Check out FocusWriter and WriteMonkey (the old version, not the beta, which uses Electron).