(If you’re working in IA Writer and running an Eleventy local server which watches for changes, you can see it re-building frequently.)

It seems to be much less aggressive with auto-saving, compared to IA Writer.IA Writer is very opinionated in this respect, giving you a very limited choice of three (!) custom-designed fonts. I like that I can choose my editor typeface.To be fair, since I shifted to a folder-based structure for my blog I’m usually working with just a single index.md file anyway, so this is not that big a deal unless I need to search across all my posts. MacDown feels closer to Byword than Ulysses or IA Writer - it’s very single-file focused there’s no folder tray or anything like that.(For context: I also use nvALT and Byword a lot for quick, single-file Markdown edits.) Initial observations # I’ve been evaluating IA Writer this week after running into some constraints with Ulysses, but I’m also quite partial to projects that are labors of love-MacDown apparently came to life after Mou ceased development. Visit the Features page for more details.Following up on my text editor musings from my website launch post, Nicolas Hoizey recommended MacDown, an open-source Markdown editor from Tzu-ping Chung. Syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks.

Highly customisable Markdown rendering.MacDown is heavily influenced by Mou, and I try to mimic much of its behaviour as much as possible both in UI and the logic underneath, only making changes when I feel that improvement is necessary.

So I started from scratch, spent some weekends hacking together my own solution. I don’t have nearly enough money to match Chen Luo’s purposed offer, but I do have my own pocket of tricks and some free time. No suitable offers surfaced (I honestly do not think there will be, either), and I decided that instead of waiting for others to do something about this, I should act myself. It came as a great shock when Chen Luo announced that he felt he could not actively continue the development, and wished to sell the ownership of Mou. I write Markdown all the time, and since I use macOS on a daily basis, Mou is my go-to editor whenever I wish to generate something with markup.

Macdown shell