MacDown vs GitKraken Client

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

It's modern and beautiful, it looks clean and refined.

It's simple: the most used features (pull, push, branch, stash, commit) are accessible in one click, and are the only buttons. The other features aren't in complicated menus nor in hundreds of buttons, but rather displayed when you right-click on something.

It gives more space to the commits, i.e. the most important things. In fact, you can collapse or reduce the other menus/windows.

It displays the current path (project, branch) on an horizontal (clickable) bar at the top. It's just a matter of taste but I prefer this to the traditional "tree" view.

It has undo and redo buttons on the main window.

It supports some drag-and-drop gestures (for example: drag-and-droping the local branch to the remote one pushes it).

A lot of care has gone into trying to make GitKraken as easy and intuitive as possible and it show. Every action is quick and painless with no more user interaction than necessary. For example, switching to another branch is as easy as a double-click on the sidebar.

Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

GitKraken has simple undo/redo buttons that work the same way you'd expect in any other software.

GitKraken can be connected to Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket accounts through OAuth. From that point onward most if not all actions that are related to these services can be done inside GitKraken. Things like: cloning or forking a repository, adding a remote, pushing to a remote repository hosted on these services can be done inside the app.

You can even manage pull requests inside GitKraken for example. All pull requests for a certain branch for example are shown on that branch's graph.

There are both pro and free versions available. The free version is pretty complete feature-wise for day-to-day operations.

A quick glance at GitKraken's release notes shows how frequently it's updated. Updates are released on a 2-4 week cycle and each one brings new features and bug fixes.

Supports GitFlow out of the box.

GitKraken has a fuzzy finder to switch between repos/files.

GitKraken is easy to use and is brilliant for the beginner developers.

No more eyestrain staring at white screens - GitKraken has a lovely dark theme.