SmartDown

SmartDown is an intriguing, thoughtful option in an increasingly crowded field of web-focused text editors for the Mac. It features full Markdown support to maximize speed and intuitiveness in text styling, as well as full MultiMarkdown support to offer a more robust, seemingly limitless text editing and production environment. You can quickly toggle between Markdown view and a live web preview to get an immediate read on how your text styling will look – even regular HTML markup is expressed within SmartDown, meaning web content creation can begin and end in this one streamlined app. The best apps allow themselves to be discovered over and over again through time, and SmartDown is no exception. On the surface, it’s an unassuming experience that requires minimal brain power – just focus on writing. But the more you ask of the app, the more it gives, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a real gap in functionality that you’d expect from an app in its class. While it emphasizes web content creation, SmartDown pays close attention to the needs of writers by offering detailed statistics and word goals, as well as an extremely effective outlining process, complete with collapsible headings. Critic Markup is a revelation, allowing to keep track of changes as your document evolves. All in all, it’s a streamlined environment that is relentlessly customizable and finely tuned to a wide variety of content creators.

In the current market a MarkDown editor has to be more powerful than that, especially for $20. Where is the support for multiple programming languages that others implement (for example via Prism)? You should be able to see your MarkDown and the end product side by side, not needing to switch (which is awkward). The context menu is nice but why not implement it as a toolbar, or give the option to have it as a toolbar? As it is I have to call up the context menu, then select something.

Nice, but behind the capability curve.

Personally (and I tried a few after my editor insisted on me submitting articles in MarkDown) the editor that best fills my requirements is the free MacDown.

SmartDown is an intriguing, thoughtful option in an increasingly crowded field of web-focused text editors for the Mac. It features full Markdown support to maximize speed and intuitiveness in text styling, as well as full MultiMarkdown support to offer a more robust, seemingly limitless text editing and production environment. You can quickly toggle between Markdown view and a live web preview to get an immediate read on how your text styling will look – even regular HTML markup is expressed within SmartDown, meaning web content creation can begin and end in this one streamlined app. The best apps allow themselves to be discovered over and over again through time, and SmartDown is no exception. On the surface, it’s an unassuming experience that requires minimal brain power – just focus on writing. But the more you ask of the app, the more it gives, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a real gap in functionality that you’d expect from an app in its class. While it emphasizes web content creation, SmartDown pays close attention to the needs of writers by offering detailed statistics and word goals, as well as an extremely effective outlining process, complete with collapsible headings. Critic Markup is a revelation, allowing to keep track of changes as your document evolves. All in all, it’s a streamlined environment that is relentlessly customizable and finely tuned to a wide variety of content creators.