

Show HN: Macdown - qqwpkao6
https://github.com/uranusjr/macdown

======
akerl_
I admit to being confused by the multitude of Markdown GUI apps. In my
experience, the greatest feature of Markdown is that I can write in the text
editor of my choosing and not need a special app / live preview / fancy tools
because writing and formatting Markdown is smooth and natural.

Am I missing some great feature that having a dedicated app provides?

~~~
ivanstojic
It seems like the author of MacDown might also have some sort of a
philosophical axe to grind with the author of Mou
([http://mouapp.com](http://mouapp.com)), another popular (albeit non open
source / future non-free) Markdown editor. Mou implies that it will become
non-free once it leaves the beta, but it's been in beta for years now.

The source of the issue seems to be a tweet by Mou's author in which he says
that when people say "inspired by X" they actually mean "idea stolen from X."
([https://twitter.com/remaerd/status/484914820408279040](https://twitter.com/remaerd/status/484914820408279040)).

~~~
diggan
That doesn't seem to be a source of the issue though. Navigating on to the
homepage of the application, the author (of MacDown) writes more about the
reason there. Apparently, the author of Mou, wants to stop developing Mou and
sell the project and the author of MacDown didn't have the cash and decided to
write an open source clone of it instead.

"

Why Another Markdown Editor?

I like Mou. I write Markdown all the time, and since I use OS X on a daily
basis, Mou is my go-to editor whenever I wish to generate something with
markup. But I had always wanted something more.

It came as a great shock when Chen Luo announced that he felt he could not
actively continue the development, and wished to sell the ownership of Mou. No
suitable offers surfaced (I honestly do not think there will be, either), and
I decided that instead of waiting for others to do something about this, I
should act myself.

I don’t have nearly enough money to match Chen Luo’s purposed offer, but I do
have my own pocket of tricks and some free time. So I started from scratch,
spent some weekends hacking together my own solution. And this is the result.

"

[http://macdown.uranusjr.com/](http://macdown.uranusjr.com/)

------
optimusclimb
You'd have to pry emacs from my cold, dead hands.

Nonetheless, I have both Mou and Macdown handy, and they really are nice for
editing in markdown. As someone else said, marking up your documents in
markdown is great, but reading/proofing them as they will be rendered at the
same time really enhances the experience.

As for which I prefer, or which is better? So far I haven't seen enough
difference to recommend one over the other. However, the fact that Mou seems
like it might be becoming abandonware, or, "a release every now and then if I
feel like it, maybe"-ware is upsetting. Everyone's seen the effect that's had
on Sublime. So on that note, I'm kind of glad someone made an open source
version.

I find it weird in the field of text editors - emacs and vim are some of the
most useful, powerful pieces of software in existence - and they are free, and
open source.

So, if you're going to compete in that arena and charge, you had better be
serious about it, and update often (i.e. IntelliJ or Pycharm.)

------
lynndylanhurley
I've been using this for a few weeks now and I really like it.

My only complaint is that the preview window doesn't line up with the editor
window sometimes, usually when using lots of images.

Overall it's been really great tho. It's the best markdown editor that I've
ever used. Excellent work.

------
plainOldText
I personally like it. Very simple. Seems a bit better than Mou, which btw
doesn't recognize the github flavored code blocks.

------
plg
Just asking (not trolling, really), but what are the reasons for using
markdown and not emacs org-mode? Is it simply that you don't have to use
emacs? I like markdown and all but it seems redundant since org-mode already
exists.

~~~
jasonlotito
Org-mode came out in 2003. Markdown in 2004. Considering when they came out, I
could also just say markdown already exists.

As for why people use markdown, it's probably a mix of being simple, being
used everywhere already, and not something directly associated with being
emacs specific.

~~~
plg
sure that makes sense, I wasn't aware of the similar dates

------
fideloper
As a long time Mou user, I think this looks awesome - it sounds like it has
improved some if the (my) pain points of Mou, such as proper code fence
support and syntax highlighting.

Gonna try it out!

------
nichochar
I have used macdown for like a month, and it's quite good, but a little
glitchy. A couple crashes, and something that bothers me a lot: it doesn't
deal very well with scrolling

------
binaryanomaly
Hmm, the Dev should get a proper registration with apple. I don't like these
untrusted warnings and the need to add an exception too much, nowadays.

------
arvindravi
Looks neat! The brew cask is broken, though. You might want to get that
checked.

Error: No available cask for macdown

------
hyp0
looks really well done and full-featured, esp for such an early version! And
is why we can't make a living from libraries.

------
tuananh
Markdown is like a simple, limited html with better syntax. i think we all can
already imagine what will it looks like when converted to HTML.

