MultiMarkdown Composer vs MacDown

Not many popular Markdown editors support MultiMarkdown syntax.

You can export to HTML, PDF, LaTeX, RTF, OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, ePub, OPML.

Generates a table of contents based on the headers in the Markdown file being worked on.

Elastic tabstops are used to align text automatically during writing. When there's a change in the text, MultiMarkdown Composer automatically aligns all lines both on the beginning and end of them.

Hold a key down and get synchronized scrolling.

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