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Show HN: LightPaper for Mac – Free Markdown editor (clockworkengine.com)

132 points by jnardiello ↗ HN
I'm not the author of the app (nor i have any connection with them, just a random user). iA Writer and Writer Pro aren't well suited for me as a developer. They feel quite "strange" to me. Mou is a good option (free too) but still missing some features. So far this, this editor is the most complete user-friendly. Hope it helps!

79 comments

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santa_boy
Looks like a good alternative.

FWIW, I am very happy now with:

1. [Haroopad - The Next Document processor based on Markdown](http://pad.haroopress.com/)

2. [mouapp.com](http://mouapp.com/)

Haroopad mainly because it is open source and based on node-webkit and very compatible across platforms.

jnardiello
Haroopad looks very promising as well. I'll definitely give it a try.
zaroth
Thanks for the link to Haroopad! I installed it and looks really nice, super easy and fast.

A couple initial downsides...

- I thought Chromium had spell checking, but you don't get it in node-webkit apparently, or it's been disabled. Must have spell check, even poor Chrome spell check.

- Export to HTML - The resulting document doesn't look quite as good in Chrome as exported HTML as it does in the preview pane in the editor; so it's not quite WYSIWYG. There are ways to customize the style of the export, the preview pane itself is HTML... (Export to 'Plain HTML' and put your own .CSS?) But it would be really nice if 'Export as Styled HTML ' got you a matched document at least in Chrome.

- I think word wrap is broken on the editor pane - it should wrap entire words at the end of the line, not cut words in half, right?

Saving documents directly as .md is an interesting trade-off. It's just plain text, which makes things oh so simple. But I'm not sure if this eliminates the possibility for having any non-visible text or meta-data at all inside the document, so that might cut off future features. Not a downside of Haroodpad really, just a consideration for using naked markdown. Most will probably see this as a pro not a con.

asselinpaul
How does it compare with Mou?
jnardiello
Quite similar to be honest (Mou was my favurite editor so far) but this is really a step forward - IMHO. Interface is a lot better and it supports flavored markdown (having to double-space for newline makes using Mou quite a pain).
lauriswtf
So far I was really enjoying Mou App[0], but this looks like a step forward.

[0]http://mouapp.com/

SyneRyder
Any particular reason this is better than Mou? The only advantage I can see from the website is the tabbed file viewer, but I guess I've missed something. (10.8+ seems a disadvantage over Mou, it has versions for 10.6 & 10.7)
slig
I have a friend who uses Mou daily, and he complains about Mou leaking memory. Also, Mou is for 10.7 and up only.
AYBABTME
Mou is not a very serious editor. It's just convenient because of the live reload and some Markdown highlighting/styling. You quickly get insane working with the lacking text manipulation features and the depressingly broken undo/redo.
timtamboy63
The reason I use Mou is for the LaTeX integration. Haven't found another editor that does that.
Lazare
Interesting. Just yesterday I decided to start blogging again with Octopress, and conducted a fairly extensive search for a good Markdown editor for OSX, and found nothing impressive. Mau gets tons of attention, as does Marked, but neither does a good job of handling an octopress post with code blocks.

I'd ended up giving up and just going back to Sublime, but LightPaper handles my use case perfectly, so...nice. I think I'll be using this.

jonalmeida
After reading your comment I made the switch as well.

For others reference, you can use Jekyll with LightPaper if you switch your highlighter from pygments to redcarpet which supports triple-back ticks (variable 'markdown' should be 'redcarpet' in _config.yml file).

Spent an hour at least changing all my blog posts just so that I can now use this editor without ANY issues at all.

AYBABTME
Mou is really annoying in the way it handles history. I guess it's author never heard of the command pattern, because Undo-ing the history doesn't consider the autocompletions Mou did and just generally doesn't work and mess up your document. Then Redo-ing helps cementing the mess.

Also the editor is very lacking in functionality, in term of text manipulation.

I started by liking Mou, then working around the issues, then getting pretty angry at it from all the time I wasted trying to make it work - all that just to get a live editor. Ended up setting a Grunt task.

I've reported those problems to the author who didn't seem to give a damn.

adrianhoward
I currently use Sublime Text 2 in distraction free mode + the SmartMarkdown package + a tweaked Solarized theme with some extra markdown syntax highlighting. Works for me ;)
jawngee
What? No Syntax Control?

Looks great. Does it support Github flavor?

jnardiello
I'm using it right now and it supports Github flavor partially. No strikethrough, no autolinking, no code syntax highlighting.
TobbenTM
Also only for Mac. Should say in title.
wubbfindel
The title claimed it's "the best", but I find it hard to consider any software the best of its kind when it's only available on one platform.
guptaneil
Good thing it's available on more than one platform? http://clockworkengine.com/lightpaper-android/

Although in my experience, the best software of its kind is usually limited to one platform. Otherwise, you're stuck catering to the lowest common denominator of all supported platforms.

smilekzs
The Android version is not free.
intull
The pro is paid. There's a freeware version too
wubbfindel
Fair enough, I stand partially corrected. The link takes you only to the "for Mac" version.

However, I was thinking more of other desktop platforms...

mythealias
I agree but then again everyone uses the superlative adjectives as a default.
coldtea
>but I find it hard to consider any software the best of its kind when it's only available on one platform.

So if you had Photoshop only on the Mac, say, and the rest of the platforms had stuff like MS Paint, you'd still not consider it the best of its kind?

Professionals that are not system administrators don't switch between platforms that often. A software can very well be the best of its kind and single platform.

intull
Title should be - The best Markdown editor for Mac and Android (and it's free).
apetrov
looks like it doesn't know that markdown supports tables.
Khaine
Markdown itself does not support tables, you need to fall back to pure html tables as per the spec

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

reirob
Well at least the Pandoc markdown dialect supports three types of tables: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#tables

I have to admit that none of them satisfies me completely (sometimes I wish for mediawiki table support) - but at least they are faithful to the principle to be recognizable as tables in text editors.

mr_spothawk
bah! "Can't open because it's from an unidentified developer"

Anyway, fixed that:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Allow Apps Downloaded from Anywhere

willthames
A better workaround is to right-click the download and then select Open, which will then ask you if you really want to open. That way you maintain the additional protection in general while still bypassing it for this (and similar) instance.
denrober
Would be nice if it supported the git extensions for syntax highlighting.
suprjami
Android user here. When you link with Dropbox, Lightpaper wants to create its own folder to store documents in, and cannot get out of that folder.

It would be nice if I could access, oh you know, all the pre-existing Markdown content I have arranged in multiple folders and already syncing down to different places.

This is a fail for me. [Draft](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mvilla.dra...) does nicely on Android, and [Dillinger.io](http://dillinger.io/) on desktop/browser.

asimov42
Looks like they have chosen to only use App Folder permissions rather than full Dropbox. I suppose it helps in getting production approval, but then if other apps are able to get them I wonder why can't lightpaper.
rhythmvs
Thanks for sharing! I’ve added LightPaper to my curated list of Markdown editors.

I’m maintaining a repo¹ with a collection of Markdown resources, listing the abundances of 𝗠⬇ dialects, parsers, editors², stylesheets, … Please feel free to commit!

[¹] https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources [²] https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...

frik
Nice lists!

Maybe you can enable the GitHub wiki so that others can edit them using "Markdown" too?

The lists are provided in yet another plain text format (YAML). Reading them using the GitHub website is not so nice, and it feels weird especially as it's about Markdown a direct format-competitor..

rhythmvs
Thanks for the hint! Done:

https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/wiki/Nota-ben...

If there were only that much support for YAML (as regards parsers, stylesheets, and integration in e.g. Github), as there is for MD…

IMO, Markdown is for text (i.e. continuous reading), while YAML is for structured data (not sequentially read, but randomly accessed/queried).

elrodeo
Would you mind to add http://NoteHub.org to your list (free & OSS hosting for MD pages)?
rhythmvs
Thanks! Added: https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...

Nice project, and tastefully executed! Plus I can definitely see the usefulness of anonymous one-off publishing, with all the benefits of Markdown formatting…

http://www.notehub.org/2013/12/28/put-notehub-to-the-test?he...

Any particular reason why you picked Pagedown.js for Markdown parsing (it supports plain Markdown only, hence no support for tables)? Maybe have a look at some alternatives? — https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...

Best of luck with the project!

elrodeo
Thanks a lot! I don't remember whyI picked Pagedown.js, but I'll definitely take a look on the alternatives on your list.
macco
I dont't know. Why do need people a specialised markdown editor? Use your favorite editor, install a markdown add-on and your done.

Do I miss something?

taude
Having a live preview is pretty nice when you start getting into slightly more complicated documents? Especially when you start working in specific markdown varients, like github, table addons, code, etc...
swombat
I don't see how it's "best" or even "better". Mou, mentioned by others, works better. Mou struggles with large Markdown files, but at least it doesn't have strange display issues when scrolling up and down in the editing window, and it shows more useful visual cues in the editing window.

Currently my workflow for writing blog posts is: iA Writer for the initial draft, then tidy up in Mou, then stick it on swombat.com. LightPaper seems too fragile to fit in that without hassling me along the way.

johnchristopher
Seems nice. Unfortunately I feel a bit left out since the old 2006 intel iMac (core2duo) I was given (for free) won't ever be updated past Snow Leopard (10.6).

Any reasons why more and more applications are 10.7 or 10.8 only (like Sublime eg) ? This iMac is still responsive and a joy to use (much more than my Vaio i5 laptop).

nathos
There are powerful new APIs available to developers that are only available on newer versions of OSX.
city41
This is how OSX has always worked. Not upgrading to the latest really isn't an option in Apple land. Because new apps tend to only support the two most recent versions of OSX. Both to take advantage of new APIs, and to not have to expend the energy to maintain compatibility with old versions of OSX.

This is the same company that has jumped across three processor families and two major OS architectures. Apple has never been very concerned with backwards compatibility.

[dead] johnchristopher
Seems nice. Unfortunately I feel a bit left out since the old 2006 intel iMac (core2duo) I was given (for free) won't ever be updated past Snow Leopard (10.6).

Any reasons why more and more applications are 10.7 or 10.8 only ? This iMac is still responsive and a joy to use (much more than my Vaio i5 laptop).

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
taude
No talk of Windows alternatives here, and since I just setup a Win machine yesterday, I found Markdown Pad 2 [1]. There's both free and paid version. It seems to get the job done for me for now. I am a Mou user on Mac.

Just installed this, will check it out, especially the git-hub jekyll pages stuff...

[1] http://markdownpad.com/news/2013/introducing- markdownpad-2/