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Markdown Editor for web developers, on Mac OS X
- chenluois 15y agoA new Markdown editor for Mac I made, it's still in early beta stage. Requires OS X 10.7+ to run. :)
- dongsheng 15y agoVery nice, love the color scheme and content preview. Will it be free once off beta?
- chenluois 15y agoNot decided yet. But if 1.0 turned into shareware, all the people who donated during beta will receive a license for free.
- dongsheng 15y agoThat's what I was wondering, donating or buying it eventually, will be good to write a note on donation, so people like me know what will be happening :)
- chenluois 15y agoThanks! I just added a note below the download button. - "Note: All the people who donated during beta will receive a license for free when Mou 1.0 released."
- 8ig8 15y agoColor scheme looks to be basd on Solarized: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
- troels 15y agoVery fine. I would suggest that you let the right pane follow the scroll position of the left pane (Or really - just have one scrollbar for them both). I know this isn't easy to accomplish, but it would really make a difference.
- chenluois 15y agoThanks for your suggestion! I'll see if I can find a good method to implement it.
- wladimir 15y agoMacOS only :( Why don't people add that to the title? It would prevent non-mac users from getting their expectations up.
- anatoly 15y agoDoesn't say it on the page either until the very bottom. It's almost as if it's a statement _not_ to say it upfront. It transmits the unspoken assumption that you don't care about anything else or you don't expect your visitors to.
- high5ths 15y agoThat's ridiculous. There's a screenshot at the top of the page; it's clearly on Mac OS X, and it isn't as if it claims to be a universal app for the whole planet. Personally I think if the page began with a giant "ONLY ON MAC OS X" disclaimer that would look more like he only cared about that. It was just an oversight in the Hacker News post title which has now been corrected.
- anatoly 15y agoNo, it isn't ridiculous. I've seen many projects available for multiple OS's that choose to advertise themselves with a Mac screenshot (or a Windows screenshot, or a Linux screenshot) at the top. The screenshot by itself says it runs on Macs, but doesn't establish that it's Mac-only; you need to read all the way to the bottom to make sure of that. It's disdainful of a non-Mac user; that may be accidental, but I've seen this more often on Mac product sites than on Win/Linux product sites. Your "giant ONLY ON MAC OS X disclaimer" is a strawman; what would be normal and courteous is simply mentioning that it's for OS X somewhere at the top. There are many, many product sites that do it successfully (e.g. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom). The post title on HN is a separate issue that's actually less of a problem. A random link to a product on HN doesn't carry an implicit assumption that it'll run on my OS. I don't mind clicking on it and discovering it doesn't (and besides, the author can't control the text of a link that leads to their site). But when I need to scroll down five pages on the site to ascertain I can't actually use it, that's irksome.
- d0vs 15y agoPlease someone do this with HTML.
- Twisol 15y agoStrictly speaking, Adobe has: it's called Dreamweaver.
- geoffb 15y agoWhile it's probably not exactly what you're looking for, Safari's Snippet Editor is great for whipping up some quick HTML with auto preview. Accessible via the menu, Develop > Show Snippet Editor. No syntax highlighting which is kind of a bummer. http://i.imgur.com/omtFb.png http://i.imgur.com/omtFb.png
- _frog 15y agoWow I'd never seen that before, very useful little tool.
- jrmoran 15y agoA while ago I wanted something similar and could not find it, so I decided to put this together http://jrmoran.com/playground/markdown-live-editor/ http://jrmoran.com/playground/markdown-live-editor/. It has some minor bugs and I have not updated it in a while.
- winter_blue 15y agoI think KDevelop has something like that.
- chubs 15y agoLooks pretty sweet. Markdown really is coming into a golden age, its everywhere: git readmes, stackoverflow posts, i'm even using it to write my presentations in these days! Love it :)
- kib2 15y agoI'm just wondering why Creole wiki syntax failed on this particular point: for me, the syntax is much more consistent and easier to parse.
- masklinn 15y agoMarkdown took email/mailing list/usenet conventions and turned them into syntax.
- zerostar07 15y agoThe HN crowd isn't everyone. Markdown is just another markup among hundreds.
- headsclouds 15y agoThis is already awesome, great work. However, if you integrated this with Simplenote, or a similar service, it would be even better.
- chenluois 15y agoThanks for your suggestion!
- derpapst 15y agoStackOverflow published their greatly extended bugfix of the original markdown web editor as OpenSource. They named it pagedown IIRC.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoThis looks amazing, but is it available for snow leopard?
- lux 15y agoAwesome, and very handy! One important feature request for developers: Support Github-style code blocks, e.g. ``` some code ```
- chenluois 15y agoThanks for your suggestion!
- exogen 15y agoLooks great. Just a suggestion, I'd add another download link to the top of the page.
- latch 15y agoLooks great. Any chance you can make the line-height adjustable? I find the editor a little too squished. It would also be useful if users could supply their own css for the preview rendering...that way you could see what it'll look like with your own stylesheet.
- latch 15y agoThe scrolling needs some work as well. It seems as soon as I write anything, the preview just shoots back to the top. Ideally it would follow me as I type and the two would link up transparently and smoothly.
- chenluois 15y ago@latch, thanks for your suggestion, "custom line-height" and "Improve scroll behavior". Custom css for preview rendering is already possible now. Simply edit the css file inside Mou's app bundle: http://cl.ly/AaUT http://cl.ly/AaUT But do backups first! :)
- chico_dusty 15y agoLooks like Markdown editors for Mac OS X is the new dropbox-syncing editors for iOS. Everyone has a half-finished version in the works.
- arthurschreiber 15y agoReminds me a lot of iA Writer (which is a commercial markdown editor): http://www.iawriter.com/ http://www.iawriter.com/
- _frog 15y agoThose using MultiMarkdown[1], which this app seemingly doesn't support, may be interested in the MultiMarkdown Composer app[2] that should be out within a month or so. It's being worked on by the (very) active developer of MultiMarkdown and looks perfect for fans like myself. [1]: http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ [2]: http://multimarkdown.com/ http://multimarkdown.com/
- dgallagher 15y agoThat looks very nice, especially the TOC. I'd love to see it have a file-browser too similar to TextMate's, which is very nice if you like to organize MMD notes/docs in different files and folders.
- _frog 15y agoJust a note, it'd be awesome if there was some way to specify the stylesheet used in the preview pane, I'd love to be able to see exactly how the result will look on my site.
- chenluois 15y agoIt's already possible. Simply edit the css file inside Mou's app bundle: http://cl.ly/AaUT http://cl.ly/AaUT But do backups first! :)
- pooriaazimi 15y agoI'm on snow leopard, so this might not be a bug as you said it runs on SL unofficially, but it's VEERY annoying that every time I edit the 'source' on the left, preview jumps up to the beginning and I have to scroll all the way down to where I was. This is unbearable for long articles.
- friggeri 15y agoIt's great ! I just have two small requests. First, it seems you're using libdiscount (or objc bindings to libdiscount) to compile markdown, could you give the ability to pass flags to the compiler ? (e.g. activate footnotes). Second but less critical to me, I'd love to be able to tweak the CSS of the generated page (less critical because I can just tweak the style.css file in ORCDiscount). If Mou had those two (small) features I'd gladly donate/buy it when it comes out.
- chenluois 15y agoThanks for your suggestion! Replied you in Email. :)
- Void_ 15y agoOkay... https://github.com/vojto/markdownlive#readme https://github.com/vojto/markdownlive#readme
- chenluois 15y agoHi all! There're just too many comments and I can't watch this page minutes by minutes. If you have questions or suggestions, please email me directly. Thank you very much! :)
- hieronymusN 15y agoThanks for this, I've been looking for a nice simple markdown editor that can kick out HTML for a while. I used to use TextMate's with it's Markdown preview, but since I stopped using TextMate I've needed something to fill that space. (Sublime Text 2 doesn't seem to have a preview feature)
- chenluois 15y agoYou know, I'm glad you like Mou. :)
- winter_blue 15y agoIs there anything similar for LATEX?
- tikhonj 15y agoCheck out WhizzyTex mode for Emacs, which also lets you have an auto-updating preview beside your code for LaTeX.
- ttjervaag 15y agoThere's also Marked: http://markedapp.com/ http://markedapp.com/ I have no affiliation, just a happy customer. MacVim + Marked side by side is a neat combo.
- chenluois 15y agoMarked is a Previewer, not Editor. :)
- zemanel 15y agoEclipse.org Aptana has a plugin for editing markdown, but i don't remember coming across a live preview feature. Usually use Dingus for preview http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus so i'm gonna give this app a go in about 15m
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoCould anyone explain to me the trend to write HTML in some other markup syntax? I write HTML in HTML. Going from one markup language to another seems like an extra unnecessary prereq.
- kennystone 15y agoMarkdown is wonderful for simple documents often read in plain text.
- blacksmythe 15y agoI find it significantly quicker to write/edit the first draft in Markdown, then switch to HTML for final tweaks and formatting. Do others keep their final versions in Markdown?
- bambax 15y agoUsing Markdown instead of HTML is much faster, and results in readable source text, whereas source HTML is hard to parse for the naked eye.
- rapind 15y agoHTML is really verbose. I personally prefer HAML for my own stuff (it's like comparing the same doc in XML to YAML), but Markdown is definitely easy to read for programmers and non-programmers alike. Its intention is to read like a plain text email. I would't say markdown is any easier to write because the verbosity of HTML tags and structure is usually taken care of with editor macros. It's definitely easier to read the source though.
- Hemospectrum 15y agoObviously web design work should be done in HTML, or a very close approximation thereof (HAML). However, despite the link title above, Markdown isn't a web design language at all. It's for writing and editing copy, which is a very different task. Let's say you have a bunch of untrained writers who needs to do some semantic formatting. They don't know HTML, so you can't ask them to just write HTML. If you let them run rampant with a WYSIWYG word processor (probably Word) you'll wind up with monstrosities where fonts were manually bolded and enlarged to indicate headers and such, and someone has to clean up after it. If you have Markdown editors, though, you can turn an untrained writer loose with a cheat sheet ("write # to get a header" and such) and you're all set. As a bonus, you can put the Markdown document in version control, export to formats besides HTML, and a few other useful things. Some major websites like reddit have also successfully made use of Markdown and its competitors to permit rich text comments from people who know nothing about HTML.
- dearjohnlee 15y agoHashify.me may not have as many features but it is a web-based version.
- chenluois 15y agoYeah Hashify.me is made by my friend David Chambers.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mcantelon 15y agoEvery time you make a change it scrolls the preview window back up to the top, making the live preview kind of useless.
- rgbrgb 15y agoI definitely agree. I'd like to see it automatically scroll the PREVIEW relative to where the cursor is in the EDIT view. Maybe this would get annoying but it's worth a shot.
- chenluois 15y agoI'm thinking a way to improve the scroll behavior. :)
- mcantelon 15y agoAwesome... if there was a mode where it could auto scroll to where the cursor was then that would be heavenly.
- breckinloggins 15y agoDarnit! I had this EXACT same idea. Even the layout was the same in my mind. I'm not mad at the developer, major props for the hard work. But I AM mad at myself and hopefully this will serve as a reminder to future me that I should execute on my ideas.
- goblin89 15y agoPossibility to write using vertical layout is a pleasant surprise.
- chenluois 15y agoYeah, Chinese and Japanese people will enjoy vertical layout. And perhaps Korean will like it too. :)