When comparing Mou vs Haroopad, the Slant community recommends Haroopad for most people. In the question“What are the best Markdown editors for OS X?” Haroopad is ranked 7th while Mou is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Haroopad is:
Haroopad has multiple available themes to choose from and new ones can be easily built with CSS.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Advanced text editing
Mou has word auto-completion (accessed via 'esc') for English words, text transformation such as conversions to uppercase, blockquote or an h1 heading, HTML entities (such as <’s, &’s and spaces) that can be added anywhere in the text and customizable keyboard shortcuts for everything allowing for efficient use of the software's capabilities.
Pro Full syntax highlighting
Mou provides full syntax highlighting for Markdown. The highlighting can be customized manually or by applying a predefined theme.
Pro Has real-time split-screen preview
Mou is split into two columns. It displays raw Markdown on the left and formatted text on the right. Text on the right will update in near real-time as raw Markdown is written.
Pro Powerful search
Mou can do incremental ("find as you type") pattern matching search. For example, it can find all words that have x as the third letter followed by at least 4 more letters and a line break.
Pro Free beta versions
Mou is available as a free download up until the release of 1.0.
Pro Customizable
The whole editor can be customized using different color schemes and users can create own variations by editing CSS.
Pro Support for CJK characters
Mou supports CJK characters for writing Markdown in Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
Pro Export as HTML or PDF
Markdown can be exported as an HTML or a PDF file. Each export can also be styled by a custom CSS.
Pro Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Mou has keyboard shortcuts for all text manipulation actions allowing for highly efficient use of the software. These shortcuts can also be manually edited to better fit each individual workflow.
Pro Includes optional typewriter keypress sounds
The app includes optional atmospheric typewriter sounds that are triggered with each keypress. These can be enabled in the settings.
Pro Scriptogr.am & Tumblr integration via Dropbox
Mou allows writing and publishing to blogs from within the editor.
Pro Very customizable
Haroopad has multiple available themes to choose from and new ones can be easily built with CSS.
Pro Multiplatform support
Runs on Mac, Windows and Linux with 32-bit and 64-bit binary packages available.
Pro Completely free
Haroopad is a free and open source Markdown Editor.
Pro Various publishing and export options
Haroopad can publish to Wordpress, Evernote, Tumblr and MediaWiki and export to EPub, ReStructured Text, RTF and PDF.
Pro Mathematical expressions support
Haroopad supports mathematical expressions through LaTeX and MathJax.
Pro Supports MathJax
Mathematical equations can be exported to the browser by using MathJax, a JavaScript display engine with a lot of great features such as typography support and modular output.
Pro Allows embedding content from a wide variety of sources
Content from YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, Slideshare, Flickr, Instagram, Soundcloud, Wikipedia and Pastebin can be embedded in the document.
Pro The Markdown flavor can be extended
Haroopad supports GitHub Markdown flavor out of the box. But the functionality can be extended to support additional Markdown features.
Pro Vi key bindings
For people used ti vi/vim, Haroopad can be set up to be used with vi keybindings.
Pro Dual License
GPL3 license is applied to the current version and will be applied in the future to meet the internal dual licensing scheme.
Commercial use follows Apache license v2 (APLv2) for keeping the GPL license and non-commercial use under consideration.
Cons
Con No longer maintained
The latest version was released in 2014, version 1.0 was announced for 2015 but was never released. The app is not compatible with macOS Sierra.
Con Only free until 1.0 release
Once 1.0 is released (still unreleased as of May 2017, release was planned for August 2015), Mou will cost $30. It can currently be pre-ordered for half the price.
Con Text is hard to read on a big screen in full-screen mode
On big screens legibility is pretty bad when entering full-screen mode because the text is not columned nor centered. On smaller screens though, legibility is quite good even on full-screen.
Con Doesn't work as well with non-monospaced fonts
When using a non-monospaced font, the text jiggles around. It can be very annoying since users may not always want to write with a monospaced font.
Con Switching live preview on/off changes the width of text area
Con v1.0 was promised to Indiegogo founders more than a year ago
Safe to say this is dead software at this point.
Con English translation is iffy
The software was initially developed in Korean for Korean users and later translated and ported to English. The translation to English has not been perfect and there may be some weird expressions and grammatical errors along the way.
Con Documentation is in Korean
The official documentation is in Korean, so it may be a bit hard for non-Korean speakers to find their way around Haroopad.
Con Windows installer does not support easy admin installation
It can't request the necessary privileges to install to C:\Program Files.
Con Undo sometimes loses control about the selection
Select some text, select a formatting in the Markdown Syntax Helper view, undo.
Con Code pane is dark in default theme
Can be hard to read and a bit hard to find where to change it.
