A couple of days ago I asked Twitter for recommendations for markdown editors. One of the suggestions was MarsEdit and I decided to take a look.

I first heard of MarsEdit a number of years ago when I watched an OS X developer FAQ called An Evening at Alder¹. I checked it out immediately but didn’t see a need for it in my workflow. I haven’t looked at it since, until now. Today I can see a lot more reason to use it. It’s really easy to create, edit and remove Wordpress blog posts as well as pages. I can easily write in markdown (though syntax colouring only works with HTML which is a shame) and see a live(ish) preview. Currently I believe you have to manually change the preview text filter to markdown each time you begin writing, (which is just a nuisance) but that may not be the case.

MarsEdit is a pretty cool little app and I’m enjoying using it. My only potential issue is that I may end up wanting to write in markdown all the time and MarsEdit is not the tool - it’s just too dedicated as a blogging app. I’d be looking for a full text editor like BBEdit or TextMate. Both are good but flawed and do way more than I really need. Not to mention that both are fairly costly. The two big things that help are:

1. Colour coded syntax in the edit pane
2. A simple preview pane

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1. An Evening at Alder was a great video from the Tiger days where a ton of Mac developers were interviewed. I don’t remember them all, or their names, but they included Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba, Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software (makers of MarsEdit), 2 Apple in-house devs and many more. It was a great video and if you find it then let me know because it’s well worth a watch.