MacDown
The open source Markdown editor for OS X.
The open source Markdown editor for OS X.
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.
MacDown is heavily influenced by Mou, and I try to mimic much of its behaviour as much as possible both in UI and the logic underneath, only making changes when I feel that improvement is necessary. Here are some of the more important features MacDown has to offer:
Hoedown is used internally to render Markdown into HTML. This makes MacDown’s live preview both efficient and very configurable. It also supports lots of non-standard syntactic features, including the very widely-used fenced code blocks with language identifiers. You can find all the available configurations in the Preferences. Try them out!
MacDown offers syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks with language identifiers through Prism.
I am spoiled, as a programmer, by some pretty advanced auto-completion various IDEs offer. I implemented MacDown’s auto-completion to suit my own need. Hope it suits you too—or you can turn it off if you wish to.