I’m going to post this every time there’s a new markdown to pdf submission: quarto (https://quarto.org) is my go to tool. You can use it in R Studio, visual studio code or the cli. Uses pandoc under the hood, has support for latex and many more niceties.
I've been looking for a markdown editor that let's me print the rendered view and have yet to find one. Which is quite surprising given how many there are. I just use my own webapp for now, should probably open source it in case anyone else is looking for this functionality.
If you know of a nice mac app that let's me easily write / view and print markdown I'd love to hear from you!
+1 for Typora. One of the things I like is that it gives you some flexibility in how it handles images you drag into a document for embedding purposes.
My favorite option is the one where it automatically colocates assets by creating a folder with the same name as the file, appends `.assets` to it (<filename>.assets), copies the image there, and then automatically sets up the preview and embed.
Recently adopted https://github.com/marktext/marktext as I wanted the editable preview that Obsidian offers, but for all .md, not just items in my vault. I dig it so far. And it does offer printing of the render.
most of these editors offer pdf exports and the ones that don't they offer html ones that can easily be exported in the browser too. Isn't this enough?
There must be something fascinating about writing Markdown apps - either it scratches an itch, or AI is really good at creating them. There's a flood of them on r/macapps and similar places.
It's because it's effectively impossible to make a markdown authoring app that meets everyone's needs, and people tend to be picky about what they want in a writing environment. People have strong preferences about WYSIWYG, flavor of markdown (pandoc/quarto/GFM/etc), theming support, some want notes to be able to link to each other, etc. As an example, I require math notation support for basically everything I write which automatically rules out 90% of markdown editors for me.
All of this, but underlying it I've come to the conclusion that Markdown isn't a good format for a writing environment beyond just simple prose. There's too much left up to the flavour of it and it's got weaknesses.
I've been experimenting with using Markdown (in Typora) in place of Word, but it (and others I've looked at) have zero support for image positioning or sizing, or a way to have different (pre-defined) styles on different tables.
Which is a shame because I like keeping my documents in plain text, in version control and efficiently read by my LLMs. LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) for LaTeX is the closest to what I'm thinking of that I know of, but maybe something exists for Asciidoc or Typst.
I always have a hard time understanding why anyone would want a dedicated markdown editor in the first place.
Obviously I am not the intended audience for them, but for me markdown is a fundamentally plain text format, Make nice looking plain text, and if you keep to certain well known patterns, you get a chance to run it through a typeset engine. Most of the point being the plain text. If the point were the typeset document, I would pick a better language.
As such, the ideal markdown editor is a text editor.
a nice md editor feels good. when all the UI is out of the way it gives a minimalism feel and i start to notice tiny details like 'this font is really soothing' and thats where i imagine i want to put my markdown thoughts in. a pure interface
I suspect it's because there's a flood of people writing / looking at MD docs that never did before and want better tooling than is readily known to exist.
I think we're going to see a lot of dev-related tooling that traditional developers would scratch their head and think... who could this possibly be for, and why would anyone spend time making this...
And it's just because there's an entirely new class of people doing this kind of thing now.
I wrote my own wiki to use as a personal knowledge base to replace Dokuwiki because I wanted a simpler Markdown-based solution written in Python. I started it during the pandemic times and all of the code in there to date was written by hand. All of it was pretty easy except the CSS/layout parts which I'm just not very good at. It took months of free time to get it where I wanted.
I also recently created a day-to-day notes and daily planner app that's basically a bunch of markdown notes. I spent about a week of free time defining the problem, setting constraints, and refining with an LLM that wrote almost all of the code for me. I've been using it for months and it's working great.
The wiki uses Markdown because I browse it just as often as I edit and I appreciate some modicum of basic formatting. The daily notes app doesn't really _have_ to use markdown, I've just gotten accustomed to writing Markdown pretty much everywhere.
(These are on github, but I'm not posting the links here because I don't want to or care about promoting them.)
Writing is also a deeply personal exercise for many, and I can say from personal experience that the environment I write in, from the room/place I'm in to the color scheme of my editor, really matters sometimes.
I haven't found a need to build my own editor, but I can see how someone else would.
didn't know about that, but when I looked around, most of them were paid and just didn't really scratch the itch. this really starte as a simple editor for writing blog posts
I've started getting warnings from MacDown about how it'll stop working soon because Rosetta or something. I like the side by side view, but sadly this isn't that.
And of course it is MORE Electron bullshit to add to the “never install” pile. Christ. If I wanted to do everything inside a browser I WOULD FREAKING USE A BROWSER.
I recently migrated a few of my Electron apps to Tauri -- was easy and fast in my case -- went down from 130mb installer to 3mb installer. Worth considering!
Shame, too. I've been looking for a new text editor. Someone else in this thread recommended SubEtha. I'll take a look there, instead. Happy to keep my Mac Electron-free.
A web browser is one of the most complex pieces of software developed by human civilization, there should be no need to ship one with each and every trivial to semi-trivial app.
I've made some personal custom apps with it, it works pretty well. With the latest version you can also choose what language to use on the backend side, so you aren't limited to just the original Tauri + Rust framework and can also use Tauri + Node/Typescript (still faster than Electron since you don't need to bundle Chromium + Node) or Tauri + Swift / Kotlin / Go / etc.
Speed. Efficiency. UI consistency. Cross-program features that nearly every "framework" fails at.
On my macOS machines, I make an effort to only use native apps. I can't speak for what Apple ships with the OS, but AFAIK, everything I've added is native.
Perhaps it's just a placebo effect, but everything on my five-year-old personal M1 MacBook Pro feels just as snappy as the mixed bag on my two-year-old work M4 MacBook Pro.
There's also MarkEdit[0], which is essentially "TextEdit for Markdown" and is definitely _not_ Electron-based:
> For perspective: at just 4 MB, MarkEdit is much smaller than Electron apps. Handling a 10 MB file with ease puts it ahead of TextKit-based editors. Performance-first editors built with Rust lack native features, while correctness alone rules out editors that rely on regex-based Markdown parsing.
small bit of feedback, "Rice it until it
feels like yours." is pretty jargon heavy for a landing page, i don't think all that many people outside linux/tech use that term, why not "customize"?
It's funny that you say not many people outside of Linux/tech use that term when "ricing" started in car mod culture. It was used to describe the act of customizing your (typically Japanese import, hence the term "rice") car with an abundance of cosmetic mods, without investing in performance mods. So your car would look really sleek and custom on the surface, but it would still drive like a stock '94 Honda CR-X del Sol.
Before anyone asks: "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" is a backronym, not the origin of the phrase.
For Macs, there is iA Writer already. Why don't you make something equally polished for other platforms? I am genuinely interested, I always wanted iA Writer for Linux. Everything I tried falls short.
SubEthaEdit is still around and open source. It supports Markdown side-by-side view along with numerous other languages. Excellent lightweight (26mb, native) editor, available directly via the macOS store at no cost.
There so many of them published, and probably thousands more that are someone's introduction to coding and just sitting is a github rotting away.
Here are some alternatives if anyone is looking
https://editorio.crncevic.org
https://macdown.app/ (FOSS)
https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit (FOSS)
And if you must have an electron one then here are some FOSS options https://marktext.me
If you know of a nice mac app that let's me easily write / view and print markdown I'd love to hear from you!
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
* https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dCui_hHK6U
My software uses ConTeXt to typeset into PDF.
My favorite option is the one where it automatically colocates assets by creating a folder with the same name as the file, appends `.assets` to it (<filename>.assets), copies the image there, and then automatically sets up the preview and embed.
Thread hijacking but, I wonder more why Apple keeps the built-in TextEdit at its crappy state, it would be a fantastic text editor if fixed
I've been experimenting with using Markdown (in Typora) in place of Word, but it (and others I've looked at) have zero support for image positioning or sizing, or a way to have different (pre-defined) styles on different tables.
Which is a shame because I like keeping my documents in plain text, in version control and efficiently read by my LLMs. LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) for LaTeX is the closest to what I'm thinking of that I know of, but maybe something exists for Asciidoc or Typst.
Obviously I am not the intended audience for them, but for me markdown is a fundamentally plain text format, Make nice looking plain text, and if you keep to certain well known patterns, you get a chance to run it through a typeset engine. Most of the point being the plain text. If the point were the typeset document, I would pick a better language.
As such, the ideal markdown editor is a text editor.
explorations in minimalism
I think we're going to see a lot of dev-related tooling that traditional developers would scratch their head and think... who could this possibly be for, and why would anyone spend time making this...
And it's just because there's an entirely new class of people doing this kind of thing now.
I wrote my own wiki to use as a personal knowledge base to replace Dokuwiki because I wanted a simpler Markdown-based solution written in Python. I started it during the pandemic times and all of the code in there to date was written by hand. All of it was pretty easy except the CSS/layout parts which I'm just not very good at. It took months of free time to get it where I wanted.
I also recently created a day-to-day notes and daily planner app that's basically a bunch of markdown notes. I spent about a week of free time defining the problem, setting constraints, and refining with an LLM that wrote almost all of the code for me. I've been using it for months and it's working great.
The wiki uses Markdown because I browse it just as often as I edit and I appreciate some modicum of basic formatting. The daily notes app doesn't really _have_ to use markdown, I've just gotten accustomed to writing Markdown pretty much everywhere.
(These are on github, but I'm not posting the links here because I don't want to or care about promoting them.)
I've made myself two editors recently:
https://wander.md - WYSIWYG editor that works on mac, iphone and iPad and has semantic versioning backend in.
https://original.me - fully native macOS editor that uses Apple Notes as backend.
those are ver interesting to build, but also way more possible. I think it would have take me years before.
i will add optional wander-native cloud sync and would probably charge for that.
Writing is also a deeply personal exercise for many, and I can say from personal experience that the environment I write in, from the room/place I'm in to the color scheme of my editor, really matters sometimes.
I haven't found a need to build my own editor, but I can see how someone else would.
edit: Oh, electron?!
But Macdown is a universal binary? https://github.com/schuyler/macdown3000 So it should just keep working
[1]: https://macdown.app
YETANOTHER.md
YETANOTHERAGAIN.md
Every AI agent creates markdown files, Google Docs supports markdown etc.
https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer <- 130mb to 3mb from Electron to Tauri
Whoops! Thanks for the warning. I'm out.
Shame, too. I've been looking for a new text editor. Someone else in this thread recommended SubEtha. I'll take a look there, instead. Happy to keep my Mac Electron-free.
Speed. Efficiency. UI consistency. Cross-program features that nearly every "framework" fails at.
On my macOS machines, I make an effort to only use native apps. I can't speak for what Apple ships with the OS, but AFAIK, everything I've added is native.
Perhaps it's just a placebo effect, but everything on my five-year-old personal M1 MacBook Pro feels just as snappy as the mixed bag on my two-year-old work M4 MacBook Pro.
> For perspective: at just 4 MB, MarkEdit is much smaller than Electron apps. Handling a 10 MB file with ease puts it ahead of TextKit-based editors. Performance-first editors built with Rust lack native features, while correctness alone rules out editors that rely on regex-based Markdown parsing.
[0]: https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit
Before anyone asks: "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" is a backronym, not the origin of the phrase.
The term is quite a bit older than today's tech bubble.
It came out of hotrod car modification clubs that specialize in Japanese brands. Some consider it pejorative. (See: "rice rocket.")
https://subethaedit.net