#Mac macdown portable#
#Mac macdown free#

The dark pane is the editor where you type, and the white pane shows, real-time, the pretty, rendered version. When you first open MacDown, you get a dark pane on the left, and a white pane on the right. Then there are people like me who like instant gratification and want to see if two asterisks on either side of a word really will make it bold. I’m betting that there are people who want a distraction-free environment, so they do not want to see the rendered results of their work while they’re typing. I suspect there are people of two minds about Markdown editors.

#Mac macdown free#

It’s a free and open source Markdown editor just for the Mac from MacDown with Examples The app I’m excited about is called MacDown. It does suit my fancy to change applications more often than most people change their clothes, so I’d like to tell you about one that is currently delighting me. You can use a different one each day if it suits your fancy. One of the fun things about Markdown is that you can choose any Markdown editor you like. Let’s stop there with why Markdown is cool and I’ll finally get to why I wanted to talk about it today. It’s easy to read, it’s easy to create, and is future-proof because everyone can understand what you meant. “) you’ll start a similarly formatted numbered list. If you type the number 1 and a period and a space (“1. If you simply type an asterisk and then a space, that starts a bulleted list that will be nicely indented and word-wrapped without any faffing about in rulers and adding tabs and such. One of the things Markdown makes really easy is bulleted and numbered lists. Don’t like using asterisks for this? You can also use one or two underlines on either side for italics or bold. Want italics? Use one asterisk on either side. You simply put two asterisks on either side of the word or phrase you want embolden. Let’s say you want to make some bold text. But I do think a smidge more information on how Markdown works would help because I’m going to be telling you about a Markdown editor I like.

Search for Markdown guide or Markdown cheatsheet, and you’ll be rewarded with many sites that can help teach you. This isn’t a lesson on using Markdown, as there are far better instructional sites to do that.

#Mac macdown portable#

Markdown is portable across platforms and all Markdown interpreters, and even if Markdown itself goes out of favor, it’s still human-readable. Using proprietary tools like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages creates text files that aren’t portable to other tools, and can cause problems sharing across platforms. That sounds like a bold statement, but since it’s a plain-text format the statement is accurate. While Markdown might seem like a fad, and its fans are sometimes almost cultish in their adoration, Markdown itself is something to consider because it’s future-proof. I’m crazy about the messaging app Telegram, and I use Markdown in it all the time to format what I’m writing. One great place to experiment with Markdown is in our Slack ( /slack), because Slack also has Markdown support. Markdown can do some really complex things like creating tables in a super-easy way, but you don’t have to exercise all of the features of this little language to still get some benefits from it. You may want to make a comment on a blog or fill out a description in an online form and you can use Markdown to format your text as bold, underlined, or italics, and to add bulleted and numbered lists. Because Markdown is so popular amongst nerds, they’ve built Markdown support into lots of tools you use every day. You might be thinking this isn’t interesting to you because you don’t write a blog, but there are reasons to learn a smidge of Markdown even for normal people. Markdown is a plain-text format that simplifies writing for the web and is easier to read than HTML. I don’t know if you’ve gotten onto the Markdown train yet, but I’ve been enjoying it more and more over the years since Bart first started nagging me to use it. Editor and Preview Pane Showing Formatting in MacDown