Why MarkEdit
We have lots of cross-platform editors already, way too enough, let's bring some love back to Mac.
MarkEdit is built for those who still love aesthetic macOS apps. As a decent document-based app, you get lots of awesome features that you are familiar with for free.
We respect macOS conventions entirely, including UI controls, key bindings, etc. All native features are kept, such as force-touching a word to look up, force-touching a link to preview, option-esc to complete words, and check spelling while typing. One more thing, inline predictions in macOS Sonoma is available in MarkEdit.
Many Markdown apps cannot open a 2 MB file, and cannot smoothly edit a 500 KB file with syntax highlighting enabled.
In MarkEdit, opening a 10 MB file is eye-blinking (tested on an 8-yo MacBook Pro), editing a few megabytes is just the same as editing a few kilobytes. We make every keystroke as smooth as butter.
In fact, MarkEdit can handle huge files, as discussed in #174.
You don't need a 300 MB app to edit Markdown files.
What about 30 MB? Better, but MarkEdit is only 3 MB (gzipped installer size), and that's enough.
We lied; it works as naturally as you can imagine.
It is absurd to spend time on tools, instead of focusing on writing. We create a delightful experience for writing Markdown, and that's it.
You don't need to learn tons of irrelevant concepts just to start writing, and when you decide to leave you won't feel lost.
Except for editor settings, MarkEdit doesn't store anything, files created using MarkEdit are absolutely just plain text files on your machine.
Also, we don't care about how you sync files, it can be iCloud or any other cloud storage, or versioning tool like Git.
Furthermore, we don't even run a server for MarkEdit. The only request in the app is the GitHub releases API, we use it to check app updates, it doesn't track anything.
It's exactly 100%, not 80% or 120%. It means that we follow the spec closely, and we don't invent anything else.
MarkEdit has a super clean user interface, we don't have 100 buttons on the screen to make the app powerful, it also makes you feel right at home on macOS.
This is something we usually don't get from native macOS apps, because of the difficulty of implementing it. In MarkEdit, we can just cmd-click to create multiple carets and select multiple ranges to change altogether.
Commands built for Markdown are all multi-caret aware, they handle multiple carets and ranges perfectly.
Other than the default text checker for native macOS app, MarkEdit has also integrated Grammarly.com for proofing, you can even sign in to your account to use premium features.
> It's built on top of the Grammarly official SDK, you communicate with their server directly.
Updated: Grammarly retired their SDK for developers, we are sorry about that but there is nothing developers can do.
As an alternative, please use Grammarly for Mac going forward. It uses accessibility features to integrate into apps and works fine with MarkEdit.
We believe that a great product should be accessible to all, and we do our best to make that happen. Feel free to open an issue whenever you discover an accessibility bug, this is always a priority for us to improve.
As MarkEdit embraces macOS native app conventions, we support system services fully, which brings lots of possibilities.
In addition to that, you can create your own Shortcuts to manipulate text, as explained in Text Processing.
You heard me right. Most apps are sold as "feature-rich", MarkEdit is the opposite.
MarkEdit is not a note-taking app or knowledge base, nor is it your second brain, we don't have a great vision like that, MarkEdit was built with "just-enough-features" for Markdown editing.
You cannot even, like most other Markdown apps offer, preview Markdown as HTML. We believe Markdown is really intuitive and you don't really need to preview its output, which can be different depending on where you publish.
However, there're several situations we do need to preview, such as tables, embedded LaTex formulas, or Mermaid diagrams, we have built popover previews for that. Well, if previewing the entire document as HTML is still something you want so badly, it's perfectly to build your own or leverage tools like markserv.
Another example is that MarkEdit doesn't support converting the document to other formats, such as PDF or HTML. That's because we simply just don't believe we can make this more awesome than Pandoc, you should use Pandoc instead and we help you to achieve that more easily.
From an engineering perspective, complexity also brings the risk of low quality, amazing things are always simple and straightforward.
We built the core editor based on CodeMirror 6, we know what you're thinking about: wow, that's not native! However, we made the decision because we know text editing on macOS quite well, including TextKit 1 and TextKit 2, but still chose a web editor.
A simple fact is that TextKit is not better than contentEditable, the community doesn't even have one single editor that can compete CodeMirror or Monaco. Implementing the same behavior using TextKit is desperately hard compared to web technologies, such as multi-caret editing, code folding, etc. TextKit 2 was introduced years ago, we don't see good examples of leveraging it, the documentation and sample code from Apple are just too basic. Making a code editor is extremely hard, we are tired of exploring the darkness inside TextKit, but the open-source community of CodeMirror gives us much more confidence.
Also, we don't just wrap a web editor with Electron and publish it as a "macOS app", we use native WebView on macOS and rewrote UI controls to make the app truly delightful. The dev team has more than ten years of experience on Apple platforms and web technologies, you can totally trust that we are doing the right things, check the code and let us know if you think otherwise.
If you still have concerns about performance, try if you can find an editor that uses TextKit and can edit a 10 MB file without burning your computer.