MacDown vs Caret

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

The single pane formats your MD as you write it but retains the markup so you can see what's going on.

Hit ⌘ G to see document titles in a hierarchical view, type and use the arrows to navigate.

Hit ⌘ T to browse current folder, navigate the file system and manage your files and folders, type to search, right click to create / move / rename / delete items.

Make ten changes at the same time, not one change ten times - lets you edit multiple lines at once, perform quick and selective find and replace, etc.

Hit "Enter" to fix spelling, convert list to ordered/unordered/task, convert reference link to inline, jump to reference link definition, jump to footnote definition, visit links, etc.

Auto-completion for paths of links and images, keywords in fenced code blocks, emoji, etc.

Renders LaTeX math expressions as soon as you have finished writing them.

Hit ⌥ ↑ to extend the current selection to the next biggest element and ⌥ ↓ to shrink the selection.