iTerm2 vs MacDown

Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc.

iTerm has autocomplete features built in. It remembers your past commands and when you are writing something on the terminal, simply pressing Control-; it will show you a drop down menu of suggestions from which to choose.

Unlike most terminal emulators, iTerm2 comes with a pretty complete set of features. It has built-in search, autocompletion, tabbed navigation, Growl support and even a built-in clipboard manager for various API keys and such.

It's possible to choose a font and adjust vertical and horizontal spacing.

You can Ctrl+Click on a file path to open said file in a text editor.

Has support for mouse actions like clicking, dragging, selecting, etc.

Issues resolved fast by quality contributors.

iTerm2 is completely free and open source. It's released under the GPLv2 license.

Easy to split panes to either horizontal or vertical sections. Makes it easy to observe multiple console windows.

If an application has terminal integration, there is high probability it allows iTerm2 to be selected.

Wanna SSH your server from multiple tabs, here you go.

iTerm2 can store up to 4M of history of commands you already used. This, coupled with the built-in search features makes it possible to type a command only once and then search for it through the history for subsequent uses.

It's a perfect base to add Oh My Zsh on top of it and enjoy a lot of themes and a really pleasant look and feel.

The great mouse and clipboard support that are built-in go really well with tmux.

Using the Preferences Menu you can set up hotkeys to map virtually any action you can think of to a single key or a combination of them. This is extremely helpful as it allows you to use shortcuts to edit commands you are typing in the terminal and while most terminal emulators have shortcuts for this sort of thing, few of them let you define your own.

Many people say they use Kitty or Alacritty because they are GPU-rendered. That was true a long time ago. But iTerm2 has been GPU rendered for years now. It's so fast and smooth that you soon forget you are in a terminal.

It's super-clean and during use it gets completely out of the way, it's a beautiful canvas for your terminal work, a pure joy that never gets old.

Can be configured to work as a drop down terminal like Quake.

Very handy to use multi-tab.

MacDown is a free and open source editor influenced by Mou. It's released under the MIT license.

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.

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.

MacDown has syntax highlighting support for various languages when writing code in fenced code blocks.

MacDown has a good built-in auto-completion engine for Markdown symbols.

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.

Unlike a few other editors, MacDown lets you link between markdown pages.

This is especially useful for Markdown novices