MarkEdit - A Pure Markdown Editor for Free
Markdown documents are written in plain text and generally saved
with a .md file extension. Various apps like Obsidian and Bear use Markdown by default. There is a
whole ecosystem of tools around the easy-to-use language where you use
various keyboard elements to create styles that can be interpreted by
browsers and other apps. Markdown lets you add:
- Bold
- Italic
- Quotes
- Lists (numbered, bullets, and checklists)
- Links (to web pages and images)
- Code blocks
- Headers
- Tables
There are different flavors of Markdown, but the most commonly used one is referred to as GitHub-flavored Markdown. As a blogger, I prefer to write in Markdown to format my posts for the web. The free app, MarkEdit uses 100% pure GitHub Markdown. Out of the box. The interface is pretty bare bones, but you can customize the toolbar to use the various tools on selected text. MarkEdit permits the insertion of multiple carats, so you can highlight disconnected blocks of text. MarkEdit is intended to be a minimalist writing tool. It has a good feature set. There isn't any bloat. There are plenty of other editors that have preview, different flavors of Markdown and more. It's just a matter of taste and what your needs are.
The latest version incorporates Apple's writing tools, allowing you to use proofreading and AI rewriting tools to change your text. Although I am not personally a fan of AI-generated content, there probably isn’t any harm in letting it make a business email more professional if need be.
MarkEdit does not contain a viewer to show your text with the formatting enforced. I suggest Brett Terpstra's app Marked 2 if you're not going to be looking at your content in a browser.
