Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

5 points by rijncur 11 years ago | 10 comments

I'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?

I'm personally using Mou at the moment, but I'd prefer to use something open-source.

microfracture 11 years ago |

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/

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

[3] http://bywordapp.com/

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

microman 11 years ago |

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...

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

[2] http://weblog.masukomi.org/2014/10/09/why-i-wont-be-backing-...

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

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

rijncur 11 years ago | |

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 11 years ago |

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

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

iosnerd 11 years ago |

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 11 years ago |

Typora (http://typora.io). with beautiful design and powerful functionalities

jason_slack 11 years ago |

Atom? I am using it everyday for markdown.

codezero 11 years ago |

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

brudgers 11 years ago |

Emacs?

vim?

pc2g4d 11 years ago |

I'm a fan of MacDown