Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 12 posts

Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

#1

Post by rijncur »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

#3

Post by stephenr »

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/

Re: Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

#6

Post by microfracture »

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/

Re: Ask HN: Best Markdown editor for OS X?

#9

Post by microman »

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

Post reply on HN