Write in Markdown on Your Mac with Macdown

We have written quite a lot at ProfHacker about Markdown, a convention for writing in plain text while encoding the structure of your document—headers, block quotes, lists, footnotes, etc.—using simple typographic characters. Jason’s post from last January links to lots of ProfHacker pieces on Markdown in its first paragrah. If you regularly write for multiple formats, such as print and the web, or if you just want a way to keep writing without being distracted by fiddling with formatting, Markdown is an excellent tool for that job.

Though I still use Scrivener for some writing tasks, I’ve moved more and more toward writing just about everything in Markdown—and indeed, you can write in Markdown in Scrivener, though that’s not the app’s great strength. If you plan to build course or class websites in a platform like Jekyll, Markdown will be essential to that endeavor. In my Technologies of Text class I even require students to write in Markdown, in part to help them think more consciously about the media that underlies their messages.

You can write Markdown in any plain text editor, but there are a range of editors out there which are Markdown-aware and will, for instance, offer a visual preview of how your encoded text will be rendered. For everyday Markdown tasks I use the free application Macdown, which does just this. Macdown is very simple, focusing on providing a clean interface for writing Markdown and seeing a split-pane preview of how your text may look once exported and styled. Macdown includes a toolbar that allows you to apply Markdown tags by highlighting text and clicking on the appropriate icon, though once you learn Markdown’s relatively straightforward conventions those icons will not see much if any use. Macdown’s preferences allow you to adjust the visual appearance of the editor and select from a range of CSS stylesheets that control how the preview pane will render your writing. You can export your files in PDF or HTML, though you will have more control using Pandoc to convert your .md files into publishable formats.

In future posts I may overview some of the other free Markdown editors I recommend to students, but if you’re a Mac user you’ll find Macdown a reliable, fast, easy way to write in Markdown day to day.

Do you have a favorite editor for writing in Markdown? Tell us about yours in the comments.