I almost pried myself from reading news story after story this morning thanks to Google Now’s suggestions and the endless shenanigans of the current administration. Then I clicked one more, a SitePoint article “The Best Markdown Editors for Mac“. I skimmed it, mostly looking to see if MacDown was mentioned. It was not, but another caught my eye, and I was converted to Typora before I even tried it. The editor itself is the live preview!

typora.png

I was mostly content with MacDown aside from a pesky issue involving dollar signs. I thought it was about as minimal as it gets, and I tended to edit with the live preview disabled. But now that I’ve used this new model, I am hooked. There were still times I used the live preview to get a feel for how the entry looked without the syntax getting in the way (and masking typos). With Typora, I am always looking at the live preview, and it feels very nice.

The first thing I did was create a custom stylesheet so the live preview exactly matches my blog. There were a few hangups.

The document is contained within a div#write block, and it took me a while to narrow down an issue where my content had extra margin on the left, pushing it off center of my colored background. I found the problem did not exist when I exported as HTML with styles and viewed in a browser, so I assume there is a bug in the live rendering. The problem went away when I changed my #write block’s width to max-width, matching the styles in the provided themes.

Typora apparently renders code blocks wrapped with triple backticks instead of indentation. The Markdown parser bundled with Movable Type does not support the backtick style, so I’ll need to manually change any code blocks before publishing. The editing also gets screwed up for larger code blocks, with either many lines getting crammed onto one, or double scrollbars appearing that somehow prevent any scrolling at all.

I emailed a report along with some feature requests (SmartyPants, spell check, etc.).

Those issues aside, this is a great editing experience!