

Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X? - rijncur

I&#x27;m spending a fair amount of time drafting out reports and papers lately and Markdown is the simplest, cleanest way to write with as few distractions as possible. Any recommendations for Markdown editors on OS X?<p>I&#x27;m personally using Mou at the moment, but I&#x27;d prefer to use something open-source.
======
microfracture
Open Source:

MacDown [1] is a pretty decent MIT licensed editor. It's probably one of most
well known open source Markdown editors for OS X.

Haroopad [2] is GPLv3 licensed and does pretty much everything that MacDown
can. It is also cross platform (Windows, Linux, and OS X) which is an
advantage to some.

Both offer the ability to change their look via themes and support various
Markdown flavors.

Paid:

Byword [3] and iA Writer [4] are both very nice minimalist editors. They both
have 'focus' modes which dim all the lines and/or paragraphs in the document
except the one you are on to help you concentrate while writing, etc.

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

[2] [http://pad.haroopress.com/](http://pad.haroopress.com/)

[3] [http://bywordapp.com/](http://bywordapp.com/)

[4] [https://ia.net/writer/ios/](https://ia.net/writer/ios/)

------
microman
MacDown. Stay away from Mou. Very sketchy author. He did an Indiegogo campaign
after essentially abandoning the project and failing to sell it and hasn't
updated in 6 months after taking $25,000 from backers[0][1][2][3] He also
raised the price of the product because "There're too many pre-orders. We
decide to raise price to reduce the sale."[4]

[0] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mou-1-0-markdown-
editor-o...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mou-1-0-markdown-editor-on-os-
x-for-you)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8404034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8404034)

[2] [http://weblog.masukomi.org/2014/10/09/why-i-wont-be-
backing-...](http://weblog.masukomi.org/2014/10/09/why-i-wont-be-backing-mous-
crowdfunding-campaign)

[3] [http://larryhynes.net/2014/09/mou-against-the-
world.html](http://larryhynes.net/2014/09/mou-against-the-world.html)

[4]
[https://twitter.com/25io/status/557039037995679744](https://twitter.com/25io/status/557039037995679744)

~~~
rijncur
Brilliant post, thanks for the information. I had no idea that Mou was so
sketchy! As it turns out, I've stopped using Mou because some of the
functionality is quite buggy (e.g. it appears that the "save" function
executes in the control thread and uses a blocking save operation - because
the application freezes for several seconds when saving).

On your advice, I've now switched to MacDown and I'm really very pleased with
it indeed.

Thanks again!

------
stephenr
MacDown [1] is quite good, and it's OSS too so the chances of a Mou-esque
"this is abandoned. who wants to buy it. oh wait now its un-abandoned, please
buy it." type affair is pretty remote.

LightPaper [2] takes a more "project" approach (i.e. with a directory
navigation sidebar) and is still free but doesn't _appear_ to be OpenSource,
so it's unknown what might happen if the author decides to abandon it. It does
appear to have extensive support for (and a range of existing)
plugins/extensions to add extra functionality, too.

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

[2] [http://www.ashokgelal.com/lightpaper-for-
mac/](http://www.ashokgelal.com/lightpaper-for-mac/)

------
iosnerd
I just started using MacDown a few days ago. So far I am impressed. It has a
very simple UI and it's side by side editor/renderer is very handy. It might
replace Notes as the my notepad.

------
ilchenearly
Typora ([http://typora.io](http://typora.io)). with beautiful design and
powerful functionalities

------
jason_slack
Atom? I am using it everyday for markdown.

------
codezero
I like Byword, but often end up using stackedit because I like the side by
side rendering.

------
brudgers
Emacs?

vim?

------
pc2g4d
I'm a fan of MacDown

