I admit to being confused by the multitude of Markdown GUI apps. In my experience, the greatest feature of Markdown is that I can write in the text editor of my choosing and not need a special app / live preview / fancy tools because writing and formatting Markdown is smooth and natural.
Am I missing some great feature that having a dedicated app provides?
I use Macdown when writing things for my Jekyll[0]-powered website. I've installed the CSS of my website as a MacDown theme, and so I can see what the text would look like when published to the site, in real-time while editing.
In addition I personally have found that while raw Markdown is great for writing, when it comes down to rereading what I wrote and editing it, I prefer a properly typeset version of the text, so I don't have my reading * flow* _broken up_ by [unnecessary characters](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) and `so on`. And having a live preview lets me reread as soon as I make the change.
It's a minor difference, but I like it. To each his own.
I personally use http://marked2app.com/ for any kind of live preview of websites, or just use the built-in --watch function of Jekyll to automatically generate the site whenever I save a change.
It seems like the author of MacDown might also have some sort of a philosophical axe to grind with the author of Mou (http://mouapp.com), another popular (albeit non open source / future non-free) Markdown editor. Mou implies that it will become non-free once it leaves the beta, but it's been in beta for years now.
That doesn't seem to be a source of the issue though. Navigating on to the homepage of the application, the author (of MacDown) writes more about the reason there. Apparently, the author of Mou, wants to stop developing Mou and sell the project and the author of MacDown didn't have the cash and decided to write an open source clone of it instead.
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Why Another Markdown Editor?
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.
the Mou developer has declared that he no longer intends to work on it and attempted to sell it on a Chinese Ebay clone. I'm not sure if he was successful or not.
That being said, the plan was ALWAYS for it to be non-free when it left beta. It just never left beta. Now, it's either going to wither and die OR the new owner (if there is one) is going to want to recoup their money.
Sometimes it's useful to have a preview so you can make sure formatting is all correct and you didn't make a mistake somewhere when writing it. I just think of it of a way to make sure everything is done correctly.
A good way to remember that it's '[]()' and not the other way around is that starting with parenthesis would be a poor idea because parenthesis occurs in normal text all the time (because people do things like this).
You can have your cake and eat it; break out vi on a remote server and edit away, or get a live preview in as GUI app. Neither is a bad experience, but having a live preview is legitimately a (minor) improvement.
Am I missing some great feature that having a dedicated app provides?