One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don't is wordcount. In Caret, the document wordcount is always visible in the upper right corner, and if I select some text, the wordcount for the selection is displayed again. Others have mentioned the lack of live-preview as a deal-breaker, but I'm ok with this because of the easy, obvious shortcut. My main purpose with Markdown editors is writing READMEs and blog posts, and I usually don't keep live-preview open as I'm writing.
The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.
I'm with antback on this one. You write as many words as are needed to convey your message. Unless you are a journalist or a student, why does it matter?
Also, if you're serious about word count and other metadata about your document then you should look into Marked 2. It's got that and much more.
Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time.
The lack of good desktop Markdown editors used to haunt me, until I started building one my own and realized how poor the support for Markdown in C++ was.
Really, you can focus on writing with LaTeX? Are we talking about paragraph after paragraph of text or scientific writing with images and formulas and code, because after writing my thesis in LaTeX my experience has been different. I've lost a huge amount of time trying to adjust images, debugging compilations errors, etc.
Of course the document looks clean as it should and stands out from the rest, but still, I wasn't able to focus on writing, I had to always double-check for errors. VIM plugin for latex helped a great deal.
What makes markdown annoying for me are the different flavours of markdown. Github is different from Mediawiki is different from... and so on. I find myself constantly looking up syntax just to be sure I wrote it correctly..
2 things: 1) Markdown was intentionally designed to be readable without preview. 2) check out the Marked 2 app. It's basically a preview engine with lots of good export, formatting, and metadata (about your text) options.
The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf export. It'd be nice to be able to send a rendered markdown document to people without them needing to open a web browser to view it. There is a similar open source project here: https://github.com/dvcrn/markright
Interesting - is the idea behind free markdown desktop editing with PDF export to basically replace traditional document editors like Word or Open/Libre Office?
I'm used to thinking about markdown as just a tool for lazy people (like me) to get basic HTML formatting. Particularly for Github READMEs, and the like. LaTeX is the document preparation system that I really use (largely because of publication expectations, but I'm also pretty comfy with it at this point). The learning curve is steep.
For me markdown is easier and quicker to use than WYSISWYG editors. Combined with styling from CSS you can make some really nice looking documents from it. If I where able to export to pdf I'd definitely use it instead of word.
Both of these like promising applications, but I've just been using the Atom IDE (https://atom.io/) with the "Markdown Preview" and "Markdown to PDF" packages.
I use Ulysses (http://www.ulyssesapp.com/) but then again, it's mostly for straight up text writing. As far as I know, it doesn't support code highlighting.
With the exception of Atom, aren't those all just text editors when not extended? (Another serious question; I don't know for sure.) If so, what would be the extra baggage beyond a markdown only editor?
What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re almost all electron/webkit based and as such, notoriously heavy. Doing a quick test with a 3KB Markdown file with 7 different editors (including Caret), I’m finding that they all take between 60MB-130MB of memory.
RAM may be at a surplus now, but in my mind there’s no reason for such a light task to be that resource intensive. What’d I’d really like to see is a sort of “sublime” approach to markdown editing — a cross-platform, ultra-light, lean and mean editor written in C++. If all of the functionality Sublime Text encompasses only requires ~30MB of memory, something as specialized as a Markdown editor ought to be able to be chopped down to two-thirds or even half of that.
For you vim lovers and Mac users out there, Marked 2 [1] in live reload mode works pretty great. For vim I like the vim-markdown plugin [2].
I get live preview, 9 different styles, code formatting, the ability to export to word, PDF, HTML, ODT, and RTF...and for blogging you get a word count at the bottom. It even analyzes your text for writing style like passive voice, long words, etc.
Any chance this will have a plugin language for exporters? I desperately want something like MarkdownPad but with the ability to write an exporter for BBCode.
What exactly makes this any better than MacDown (OSX), and Markdown Pad 2 (Windows)? Both have side live preview, and accomplish pretty much everything. There could be some QOL improements in them, but I don't see how caret.io is much better.
Some of the shortcuts look better thought out in Caret (in particular the inline file browser), but mostly, it just looks slicker. For 5 bucks, I don't expect it to be "much better", just a little better.
I like the spirit of that effort, but it has a checkered history; it was born out of input from a private working group without input from the community [1]. I'm fundamentally against this philosophy as an open source advocate.
One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don't is wordcount. In Caret, the document wordcount is always visible in the upper right corner, and if I select some text, the wordcount for the selection is displayed again. Others have mentioned the lack of live-preview as a deal-breaker, but I'm ok with this because of the easy, obvious shortcut. My main purpose with Markdown editors is writing READMEs and blog posts, and I usually don't keep live-preview open as I'm writing.
The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.