I use Zettlr (https://www.zettlr.com) for all my academic writing. It's a Markdown editor that also supports Latex and exports to various file formats including Latex PDF using pandoc.

You can add custom Latex templates (https://docs.zettlr.com/de/academic/custom-templates/) and then compile to PDF. I'm also using Zotero as my citation engine that is supported natively by Zettlr.

Can only recommend it.