I hate markdown :P, not really, but I have always problems with the syntax. So, I have been browsing for years… a markdown editor… and used many … many, but none of them were good, always finding problems or stylish things. Some days ago, I just found texts.io/ and I’m impressed. Is very simple, and powerful, minimalistic, but at the same time adds many power features, as exporting to PDF, EPUB, XELATEX, Word Document, HTML5, HTML Presentation, and more… sa Math Typesetting, it handle very nice the copy and paste of rich text, and use URLs as citations, I really like that.

I have been writing some feature requests and minimal bug reports to the developers and they are very responsive;
As with ST of course, I paid for it Is at discount, give it a try, share your results. For writing papers and specifications, it looks just awesome.

I too have tried many different Markdown setups over the years, and even though I’ve finally settled on ST3 + the MarkdownEditing package, Marked 2 (draftin.com) for my workflow, I still try out just about anything that looks intriguing. I thought I’d share my thoughts on this.

I downloaded Texts (from texts.io) and immediately don’t get it. The whole point of Markdown is that content and formatting are separate. Texts is more like writing in Word or Pages the way formatting shows up as you type, using the familiar Command + I or B for italics & bold. Using “*” and “**” around your text does the same, but “_” or “__” does not work. So right off the bat I’m not sure why this is being promoted as a Markdown editor since it 1) doesn’t support basic Markdown, and 2) functions more like a traditional word processor, which I use Markdown specifically to avoid.

I admit that at this point I deleted Texts and wrote this “first impression” post, so if I’m missing something I’d love to hear about it. If Markdown text is one of the things I have to export, and I don’t actually write in Markdown or see it in my document, I’m not sure how Texts is a Markdown editor. It seems to be a word processor that exports Markdown.

If it works for you, grand. But if you have an interest in learning Markdown, I encourage you to try the great MarkdownEditing package (ST2 and ST3 via Package Control), which gives you a nice hint of what the final document will look like, but then allows you to use a Markdown renderer like Marked 2 or Fletcher Penny’s MultiMarkdown to have fine grained control over the look of the final output whether going to PDF, HTML, or both.

I have a similar workflow, but being on the Win/Linux side of things I use Pandoc for conversion. I am also rather biased against the MarkdownEditing package, but that’s probably my own peeve. The SmartMarkdown package is also very useful.

There are a couple decent Sublime packages for previewing, but I have yet to find a genuinely good previewing solution for Win/Linux, especially considering how sloppy my Markdown is:

# Heading
- List item

(I actually wrote a Markdown tmLanguage from scratch to give me proper syntax highlighting, even when I go against the syntax )

Draft is OK, but kinda fiddly. Writebox is less of a hassle, but I’m not quite happy with that, either.

Sorry to go OT. I keep doing this today

Alex

FWIW I just started using Mou. It’s pretty good wit side-by-side Markdown and rendered: mouapp.com/

I like the idea of writing/editing markdown with shortcuts instead of typing the funky syntax that I can’t remember/guess how will render. – These app you are mentioning are for OS X; text.io is cross-platform. I use Windows

I occasionally use Markdown for blog article drafts. On Windows I’m pretty happy with MarkdownPad. Of course I paid for it too.
Feels like Mou (which I use at work).

On Android there’s LightPaper Pro.

Installed, tried, uninstalled.

I tried to use it yesterday and i noticed some bad things (which made me to switch back to markdown pad):

• the result is a scrambled markdown (e.g. lists are splited with two line breaks instead of one)
• the exported html is also screwed (same lists will have empty LI tags because of those two line breaks mentioned above)
• it doesn’t know to correctly display real markdown
• it doesn’t know to open a file when i drag & drop it on the editor
• it does some kind of hard word-wrap: it inserts a \n at a certain line

However, i was very excited at first, because a real markdown wysiwyg editor is completely missing (at least on Windows). Tags (be it * or ) is something that non-tech people doesn’t get; they want to see that damn word bold, not surrounded by tags!

Lets be fair, it has some configuration options, and looks like work is in progress

• Hard wrapping can be disable with .reg file texts.io/support/0006/
• Saving with unix style new lines can be done with texts.io/support/0016/
  Here there is a document, about markdown dialects, texts.io/support/0009/ describing some of the caveats you mentioned.

I’ll request/report the features/bugs you mentioned,

• it doesn’t know to open a file when i drag & drop it on the editor

Can you please be more specific about: (some reference texts.io/support/0018/ )

• it doesn’t know to correctly display real markdown

Well, I already uninstalled the app, but i tried to open normal markdown files (e.g. readme files from various plugins) and it simply didn’t recognized new lines. Everything was one beautiful line.

Making settings via arcane Reg files (or terminal commands) it’s fairly silly, especially when it’s a such a trivial option like word wrap. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime in the future, but now… didn’t convienced me

I tried it a number of days ago and promptly uninstalled. It only understands a very small amount of actual markdown.

It only understands a very small amount of actual markdown

Like me :P, seriously I’m done with bold, linking, some lists… italics… and code

To be completely honest, i ditched markdown (which i tried to use it for the blog posting; that means that i had to convert it to html) altogether because of this simple things:

• it doesn’t have a striketrough syntax (i know this is not in the standard markdown, but is damn useful, especially on blog posts!)
• it doesn’t know how to treat code blocks (other than

   tags); I use a BB-like syntax highlighter on code, where i need to wrap the code inside of [js]code[/js] or [php]code[/php]. Hard to switch now, when i have about a hundred posts with code…

• the export just looks… bad. Not indented at all, not spaced at all.
• would be nice to have an option to export html but NOT wrap texts inside

  tags. WordPress users know what i mean

Please note that these are not issues with texts.io, but with ALL editors and/or markdown as a syntax.

Make an editor that deals with this kind of stuff and i’m sold!