I like tools that have some philosophy underneath and in this topic I will talk about Markdown. I also wanted to tell some words about Gist but I think you will explore its benefits while reading my dev notes as small gists.
This is one of things I have opened relatively recently. Amazing approach how to think about any text in context of formatted document, in context that document has to be presented in readable way so must be marked up. Even in case if there is no support (Outlook, zim, skype or even git comments) for this markup I write text in MD as it declares very basic level how to express formatting. For instance all keywords I mark using back-quotes and so on.
I believe that every new product oriented for IT person if it has editable forms must support markdown. For instance, different popular products with web-client have tons of problems regarding text fileds. WYSIWYG that does basics in formatting require from my side anormouse amount of movements.
There must be standard component in web-app development to insert editor with Markdown-support. I understand that to write text in markdown is geeky enough but we do it already in implicit way using own and different markup language every time.
Below you will find short information about the applications I use ( or used) to deal with markdown
- Chrome
- Chrome's TextDown application It is really neat application, with a lot of cool features, shortcuts. This is application where I write this note.
- StackEdit is cool too you can even sync file in Dropbox or GDrive, save locally or publish in github a lot of tasty things.
- Firefox
- Markdowneditor I haven't found any other alternatives
- Thunderbird
- Markdown-here is a way to write letters in MD
- Sublime Text/Emacs
- Here you can find many topics how to preview written text but as for me it is enough to have cool syntax coloring in this powerful editors.
Recently I have started to write functional specification for new/old discovery packages in MD. First time I started to write in pure Sublime but it is much better when preview is available. So I have checked several dedicated editors
- MarkPad - very idiomatic application
- WRITEMONKEY 2.4 FOR WINDOWS - has cool "Headings" view, different levels of headins are represented in hierarchical way
- MarkdownPad - it is my current application for editition markdown