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Add to SafariWhen comparing Homebrew vs MacDown, the Slant community recommends Homebrew for most people. In the question“What are the best developer tools for Mac OSX?” Homebrew is ranked 1st while MacDown is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Homebrew is:
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Pro Easy to setup and use
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
Pro Open Source
Pro Less maintenance than Macports
Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.
Pro Builds quickly and requires few dependencies
Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.
Pro Unintrusive
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Pro Does not require using sudo
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.
Pro Homebrew tries very hard to use existing tools and libraries
Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.
Pro Free and open source
MacDown is a free and open source editor influenced by Mou. It's released under the MIT license.
Pro Real-time split-screen preview
MacDown's main view is split into two panels. The user types on the left and the Markdown is rendered on the fly in the right panel. This helps users to better understand the way they are formatting their document.
Pro Markdown previews can be customized with CSS
You can use a CSS file to customize the rendered output and the file preview you are working on will display the rendered Markdown with the custom CSS styling on top.
Pro Supports syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks
MacDown has syntax highlighting support for various languages when writing code in fenced code blocks.
Pro Good auto-completion
MacDown has a good built-in auto-completion engine for Markdown symbols.
Pro Support for GFM
Pro Ideal for day-to-day programmers' work and MarkDown novices alike
Using MacDown for the notorious README.md use case gets you going without reading any manual or requiring any configuration values. Think of it as a sort of TextEdit for MarkDown files. Thus its shortcomings - neither powerful nor versatile - turn out to be a PRO for novices trying to jump on the MarkDown bandwagon. Open its help and you'll immediately find yourself editing the MacDown's MarkDown help file, a MarkDown primer with some MacDown menus and configuration added.
Pro Linking between pages
Unlike a few other editors, MacDown lets you link between markdown pages.
Pro Tool bar with most used markdown shortcuts
This is especially useful for Markdown novices
Cons
Con May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other than /usr/local, but that might break various packages that depend on having stuff in and relative to /usr/local/.)
Con Command line tools for XCode required
Once xcode is installed you can install Homebrew, including new(er)/different versions of most of the build stuff that xcode-select installed, like a newer gcc, newer git, etc.
Con Relies on outdated system libs
Con Not very versatile
MacDown is not very powerful or versatile. It's not customizable or extendable. This is what makes it so simple, but it's not for people who want more from their tools.
Con Frequently fails to update the display and/or flat out hangs
Must often restart MacDown.
Con The Markdown preview is rather heavy on the CPU
The Markdown preview needs a lot of resources to keep rendering on-the-fly after each keystroke. A single keystroke in the editor panel may trigger up to 5 seconds of max-CPU usage.
