The title of this topic says it all. For those of you who use an external Markdown editor with DevonThink, which do you prefer?
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I prefer Typora-a user friendly, and a ‘clean’ looking display.
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I also use Typora. Though in reality 9/10 times I just use the DT editor and never even leave edit mode.
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DT, Typora, iA Writer
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Visual studio Code. But that’s unrelated to DT, in my case.
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IA Writer for me (as it is on MacOS and IOS) and occasionally BBEdit (I bought it so feel obliged to use it). Free CotEditor gets mentioned on the forum as well. The last two are more code editors with syntax colouring.
The key thing to bear in mind is what ‘flavour’ of markdown you are using. If only basic (headings, lists, simple tables) then most markdown editors will work. However, if you are using more of the multimarkdown features (glossary, footnotes) then the available editors are more limited. DT, Obsidian, IA Writer support wikilinks but not all editors do.
Here is a useful list and what they support:
Why I use IA writer is it supports most multimarkdown features (but not all).
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Already discussed. Perhaps @bluefrog can merge these (and other threads on same topic)?
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I hate them all (DT exempted), though Highland 2 (which I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned in any of these threads) has rudimentary outliner capabilities that partly make up for the generally woeful state of outlining in Markdown editors. But you can only drag headings up and down; changing level still requires going back into the text and fiddling.
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I recommend using the big search button at the top of the page. There are already so many threads like this.
Excuse me if I sound a bit terse, but your other ChatGPT post plus these 2 short lines gives a lazy impression. Why should I put in effort if you’re not willing to put in any effort yourself? (btw, the answer to the question you asked ChatGPT was easy to find in the forum, without being redirected to documentation.)
Even if you still want to create a new thread, a bit more substance would probably lead to higher quality discussion. What have you tried yourself? What did you like and didn’t like, and why? If you want recommendations—what are you looking for, what is important to you in a markdown editor?
You already see that most answers are as short as your post and don’t tell you much. Unless you just want a list of editors without much elaboration. In that case you might as well use google.
Anyways, to keep the spirit of the forum and be nice…
- I love iA Writer myself for most things and have used it since the original iPad version. Beautiful + minimal options to fiddle with; it just helps me focus. The recent introduction of wikilinks and library improvements are very nice bonuses, but not essential for my reasons to use it. I also love the opinionated developers and how they avoid feature bloat. The only time I emailed support—about a minor thing—they were incredibly helpful.
- Sometimes CotEditor (for markdown, not code) because it’s easy to jump between headers with keyboard navigation. Plus powerful RegEx find and replace. It even helps you learn RegEx, with a handy cheat sheet and syntax coloring in the search field.
- I had Ulysses for many years, but mainly used it for writing on a deadline and/or towards a specific word count (the Writing Goals & Statistics are so helpful). For that need I would probably try Scrivener today, even if it’s not specifically a markdown editor. Just to avoid another subscription.
- I recently learned of the free MarkEdit and am quite impressed by it. It is incredibly smooth and handles large files like nothing.
- (A user reports in the GitHub repo:
"The developer is overly modest about the power of MarkEdit.
I have a 200,000-page TXT file that I use to test document editors and tried it with MarkEdit. It’s about half a gigabyte in size.
MarkEdit opens it in just a few seconds. Scrolling is easy. Line wrap is on and resizing the window is instantaneous. Very few document editors can do so. This is wonderful.
My testing is done on an M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB RAM." ) - It allows you to fold headers/sections. Very few dedicated markdown editors do this, to my knowledge. (More common in code editors)
- It has an API for extensions. Not many are available yet, but I tried the Markdown Table Editor, and it is amazing.
- My only real problem with it is that it doesn’t respect the native macOS keybind of ⌥↑ / ⌥↓ for jumping paragraphs in text fields. This is so ingrained in me. Probably my most used keyboard shortcut of all by far. I’ve been meaning to contact the developer about it.
- (A user reports in the GitHub repo:
I actually quite like DEVONthink’s markdown editor too. My main problem is that I can’t limit the line lenght/width. I’m probably in a minority, but I find this much more important than syntax highlighting and such.
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That’s planned for a future release.
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YES, I’m really glad to hear that!! I forgot to add my vote in the thread discussing it. I know it’s already somewhat possible with View > Full Screen > Document, but it’s a bit fiddly, especially if you have a laptop and often plug/unplug a desktop monitor or want to change font size. And betraying my comment about syntax highlighting, that’s not available in this view. Since I have iA Writer, that gives me both.
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Outlier here…BBEdit
I have a portrait monitor with BBEdit working on Markdown below and DEVONthink displaying the rendered form above. Quite happy.
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Another vote for BBEdit.
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Good to hear. Thanks!
I’ve been using a lot of different tools for the last couple years. I didn’t even realize the list was this long until I saw the question. But I use:
- The built-in DEVONthink UI most of the time, just because it’s convenient.
- I often used Marked 2 as a viewer and for printing output because it does such a nice job.
- On the macOS, I sometimes use BBEdit or SlickEdit to work on markdown documents.
- But honestly of late I find myself using Neovim with a couple plugins to do syntax colorization and support. The Obsidian plugin in particular is positively fantastic for organizing my daily notes, and I can use Neovim to edit any markdown document nicely.
I’m surprised I haven’t tried Scrivener yet as that’s my main writing tool on macOS (the Windows version isn’t quite where I need it to be just yet), but I might have to try that for markdown one of these days too. As if I needed another option…
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I’ve set Obsidian, Ulysses, and iA Writer to all use the same markdown notes folder I index in DEVONthink. I’ve not really settled on one editor yet. Here are my reflections:
Obsidian: the most feature-rich but bloated option. I use it for ‘daily notes’ and random little text scribbles sometimes, but when the bugs or slowdowns occur I’ll ostracize it for weeks. It comes the closest to being my all-in-one PKM / markdown notes repository, but it has failed me during mission-critical moments one too many times for me to fully adopt it.
Ulysses: my go-to for writing text I intend to publish (e.g., on my Ghost blog). I love its interface. It feels good to use. I just wish it had more PKM-oriented features like wikilinks.
iA Writer: on paper this doesn’t surpass either Obsidian or Ulysses at much, yet I keep coming back to it. When I want a minimalist markdown editor that ‘just works’ and provides PKM functionality, it’s there for me. It’s nowhere near as powerful as Obsidian, nor as beautiful as Ulysses, but it strikes a better balance of features and stability than either.
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I prefer Bbedit. It has very basic design and works great for text editing.
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When it comes to Markdown editors, there are a few that I use. Typora and also Bear. As I am very new to DevonThink, I have not explored using them much in it. I just tried them now and Typora worked as expected. Bear on the other hand has its own quirky way of managing files internally and did not seem to play well with DevinThink. I was not able to open a file from DevonThink with it. But I was able to export to the DT Global Inbox. I prefer using Bear out of DevonThink however does not look like it will be viable if I start to use DT more.
Looks like Bear is a “note taking app” that uses markdown syntax – it is not intended as a traditional text editor to work with individual files. While you can import and export files, its data/notes is stored in an SQLite database. See: Where are Bear’s notes located
But apparently they are working on a more traditional editor: Panda Sneak Peek: A Work-in-Progress Markdown Editor and Library 
- Announcement - Bear Community
+1 for MarkEdit. Simple yet powerful, and work nicely with Marked 2 which I use to preview the output.
Have not played yet with the extensions, so thanks for citing this one about tables, it might be just the right one to start to test them!
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