Some go to be notes apps (libke Bear, MWeb, which is one of my favorites, but quite expensive, FSNotes, or the open source Joplin, Notable Boostnote).
Macdown shell free#
Though, it's still lightweight, functional, with good feature (themable, fully markdown support, support of TOC, shell plugin, neat keystrokes, multiple views, tab bar, …), which made it really a complete tool, the market of markdown editors really evolved, and neither paid nor free or FOSS apps are now competing. (To be fair, with Eleventy and Browsersync maybe I should just treat the browser output as a slightly-delayed preview.) I’m going to keep trying both out for a few more days and see where I land.Macdown was a very helpful alternative to Mou when Chen Luo abandonned it, but it seems that uranusjr abandonned Macdown too. I suppose it comes down to whether I feel like the preview pane behavior is a dealbreaker. My early negative reaction to the default editor view melted away after I spent some time tweaking the preferences-setting a maximum editor width is immensely helpful, for starters: MacDown’s editor pane after setting a maximum width, using Operator Mono as the font. If IA Writer is very careful and particular-but rigid-in its design decisions, then MacDown is way more open to tinkering with the editor experience.
This is still better than what I’ve experienced in IA Writer, which doesn’t render the YAML block at all. Turns out in the Rendering section of the preferences there’s a checkbox “Detect Jekyll front-matter”, which results in a much more pleasant table rendering of YAML: Table rendering of “Jekyll” YAML block But it’s not enabled by default, so I was a little confused when I dropped in a quick attempt: Default rendering of fenced YAML front matter block MacDown’s startup screen touts Jekyll front matter support, which presumably would support Eleventy’s YAML front matter. The preview pane will render images wrapped in but content is not displayed.Wish that were sticky to however I set it last. Even if you hide the preview pane, it’ll show up whenever you open a new document.
Macdown shell update#
It’s a different key to show the preview pane than to hide it, which…shouldn’t this be a toggle? For now I’ve turned off the auto-updating, and just hit Command+R to update the preview.In contrast the IA Writer preview pane is rock solid. If you type fast it turns into a strobing/flickering mess. The preview pane defaults to updating as you type, and it flashes when updating, which is very distracting.After that it behaved more like I was used to in other programs. I had to select the shortcut text and then MacDown asked whether it wanted me to replace text automatically. For example, I have a shortcut for the YAML front matter block mapped to post. The MacOS-level text replacements didn’t seem to work at first.(If you’re working in IA Writer and running an Eleventy local server which watches for changes, you can see it re-building frequently.) It seems to be much less aggressive with auto-saving, compared to IA Writer.IA Writer is very opinionated in this respect, giving you a very limited choice of three (!) custom-designed fonts. I like that I can choose my editor typeface.To be fair, since I shifted to a folder-based structure for my blog I’m usually working with just a single index.md file anyway, so this is not that big a deal unless I need to search across all my posts. MacDown feels closer to Byword than Ulysses or IA Writer - it’s very single-file focused there’s no folder tray or anything like that.(For context: I also use nvALT and Byword a lot for quick, single-file Markdown edits.) Initial observations # I’ve been evaluating IA Writer this week after running into some constraints with Ulysses, but I’m also quite partial to projects that are labors of love-MacDown apparently came to life after Mou ceased development. Following up on my text editor musings from my website launch post, Nicolas Hoizey recommended MacDown, an open-source Markdown editor from Tzu-ping Chung.
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