There are some sweet extensions for Atom + pandoc, notably https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline and https://atom.io/p

There are some sweet extensions for Atom + pandoc, notably https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline and https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-plus https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-plus (convert with pandoc, fast & smooth preview update via DOM diffing/patching). See https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19222/3 https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19... for more goodies. With non-Atom (e.g. Vim), https://github.com/yyjhao/markmon https://github.com/yyjhao/markmon does fast DOM-diffing preview (I think it inspired markdown-preview-plus). Different direction: instead of multimedia inside markdown, consider something that mixes markdown, multimedia and other fragments. I'm specifically thinking IPython or Sage notebook. Not sure it's a win in itself but there are many other benefits for research notes... Finally, for those comfortable with latex writing, Overleaf in rich text mode is a quite good middle road — not markdown but less noise than raw latex: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81-having-a-hard-time-convincing-your-coauthors-to-learn-latex-with-our-rich-text-mode-you-no-longer-need-to-dot-dot-dot https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81-having-a-hard-time-convinci... (overleaf also has git access for offline) For math in markdown, https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown lists all tools I'm aware off. --- > I don't need embedded multimedia, but I rather use a lot of Unicode characters for mathematics. Do you mean you use unicode as poor man's math support, or that you do render via pandoc/mathjax/etc but prefer to have $β^2$ rather than $\beta^2$ in the source? I'm curious, does in-place whole-formula rendering solve your need or do you actually care about unicode symbols in source? And how would you ideally want to type them? "\be" offering autocompletion to β? http://kasperpeulen.github.io/PressAndHold/ http://kasperpeulen.github.io/PressAndHold/ ?