Kinda surprised by the rise in markdown editors whose selling point is the live preview mode. I always felt that the best feature of markdown was that the raw text made it somewhat obvious how it should be rendered. If a preview mode is need I almost want to jump straight to a WYSIWYG editor
It's both a great way to learn markdown and be sure that your output is valid when having to write things in markdown. I can't tell you how many times I've realized I made a mistake when I've already pushed a readme to github and saw the rendered markdown there...
I wonder how feasible it would be to make a markdown sanity checker, to catch common errors, or if it would have too many false alarms. "Are you sure you wanted to make a paragraph with a ton of asterisks in it, or did you really want a list?" etc.
But really, when you make errors like that, it means the markup language isn't intuitive enough. I can never ever remember the proper order for links in Markdown, I hate it. I'd rather have a WYSIWYG-ish editor that both shows your markup (so you can edit it with the keyboard) but also styles bold, headers etc on the fly.
I think there are two kinds of users of Markdown. One is those who don't need or want WYSIWYG. The other still want WYSIWYG but don't want to shift+arrowing around or constantly leaving the keyboard to reach for the mouse. The number of Markdown editors with live preview probably says that the latter group is actually not small.
This is actually my take on things. I use Mou as a writer and I think the live preview thing helps me get an idea what the final result will be. Being able to set up the CSS based on a website is also useful for knowing how headlines will line up, for example.
This. I've been making my living as a writer for ~7 years and have used Markdown as my dominant syntax for about 6.5 of those years. When I proofread, especially a long post, a preview is great.
Of course, for that, I usually just use Marked, but I'm never opposed to seeing more Markdown tools. Ever.
Agreed. We actually wrote a WYSIWYG editor on top of Markdown last year (https://github.com/wiredcraft/moleskin) but never ended up pushing it out: Markdown is simple as it is, syntax highlighting should be enough.
I run a small website that uses markdown files to render content. Users just need to upload those files and the site is updated accordingly. The haroopad editor, mou, and others help them get visual feedback on what they are doing before submitting and refreshing the site.
I use (Harpjs)[http://harpjs.com/], it's a nodejs application. It can act as a web server serving static HTML or it can do live rendering of JADE files, MARKDOWN files, LESS files, etc., and comes with templating and yelding mechanism.
Bonus: it can compile any "dynamic"* site it can process to complete static HTML.
* quote, because it's still based on flat files, not on any kind of database.
I find having a live preview really gives me a better feel for the flow of the document. I love Markdown for it's simplicity, but that doesn't mean I only ever want to see it rendered in plain text.
My biggest use for Markdown is writing my README.md files for my Github projects. And while I do care how it looks plain, I care more about how it looks to users who visit my project's Github page.
The one place I find that useful is for blog posts. I like having the ability to apply the blog's CSS to the markdown source before posting to make sure it looks right.
I'm conceptually a fan, but then I noticed its effect on my actual CPU fan. Whatever this is doing for rendering the Markdown is not cheap -- a single keystroke in the editor pane on the sample document triggers 5+ seconds of max-CPU usage.
Typing causing loud fan noises from my laptop is not the most restful experience.
Mou's live preview was neat for about a week, but eventually I just switched to Sublime Text with the MarkdownEditing, Markdown Preview, and Markdown TOC packages. Powerful stuff, and as-good-as-live preview in your browser.
My only real issue with these is that there isn't an easy way to do a RegEX to remove certain types of formatting when copying the HTML. In an ideal world, I'd prefer to not have <p> tags, for instance, because most of the time, the place I'm pasting the content inserts them at any line break automatically. I realize this isn't always the case but it's one of those "frustrating" aspects that makes me continue to use an old-as-hell TextMate bundle a friend customized for me 5 years ago.
Does anybody have any experience with this and LightPaper[0]? I'm curious if I should switch. There's so many markdown editors out there. How can I know that I'm using the best one for me? (joking) Markdown editors feel like it should be the example for the paradox of choice.
Dillinger is indeed nice, but I would like a native desktop program with the same functionality, as I'm not always connected to the internet.
Of course, I could just run it locally on my laptop, but for some reason I still prefer my web browser for web browsing, and native programs for other stuff.
Or if I could get the same functionality in Sublime Text 3 that'd be even better, but I don't know how to build a plugin to do that, or haven't found one that does.
Well, historically I think it was because Markdown was created by a Mac user. And most of the early Markdown hackers were Mac users.
Obv. Markdown is now much broader, but I still think the market of people who actively care about a Markdown-based editor for desktop or mobile are more likely to be using a Mac and iOS than Windows/Linux/Android.
If you think about it, however, that's a huge market opportunity for Markdown devs on those platforms.
Which one should be running anyway, seeing that 10.9 is the current version for a year, and we're on to 10.10 soon.
OS X releases are like minor Linux distro updates -- not in they have limited changes, but in that you don't want to fall far behind the latest version.
It's a different approach than Windows, where people can still run XP with no problem -- not that you couldn't run 10.4 or 10.3 (and some people do), but the Mac world changes and software is updated to reflect that (takes advantage of new APIs, integration, changes in style etc).
In Windows there is software available in new versions in 2014, even MS made, that still uses stuff like file open dialogs from 1998.
