Greg Ferro - Work to Live

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My Favourite Text Editors for OSX - MultiMarkdown Composer

I won’t grow up to be a proper Mac hipster until I publish an article about my favourite plain text editor. Why ? Because writing content in a desktop publishing application is anally retentive. If you are writing content then it doesn’t matter how it looks, it’s about the words, sentences and paragraphs.

Looking/writing inside a “Word Processor” like MS Word is an exercise in clutter, buttons and dicky menus that distract you. Hundreds of useless functions carefully designed to create dirty thoughts about using a baseball bat on your computer. All that extra software makes it unreliable and expensive.

Solution: MultiMarkdown Composer - my absolute favourite markdown text editor.

Seriously, you may never have heard of it. There are dozens of other Markdown ready editors. Byword, IAWriter, WriteRoom, MarkDown Pro are just some of other editors but I always come back to MultiMarkdown Composer.

First of all, check the minimalist styling. No buttons, toolbar or extraneous distractions. Second, I’m using MultiMarkdown to setup the formatting of the piece - headings, links, bullets are all covered using simple text markup system.

The left window shows the table of the contents of the article derived from the headings - this is the ONLY markdown editor that I know of that does this. . How else are you going to be able to validate the structure of your document ?

 

 

Not show here but MultiMarkdown Composer handles MultiMarkdown table formatting the best of any Markdown capable editor.

How can I tell what it looks like when it’s published ? I use the preview function. The following screen shows from my customised Marked. Marked is a partner app MultiMarkdown Composer so that I can see the output of the marked up text.

 

Once I’ve finished writing and previewed the article, I can export into several different formats. that is, Marked is able to export directly into PDF, HTMK or Rich Text. Mostly I use Rich Text to then paste into Microsoft Word and then use the formatting tools to complete the desktop publishing process.

 

 

Go now and buy this app from the Mac App Store - it’s less than USD$10. Learn MultiMarkdown and change your writing technique.