Month: May 2022

Frustrations with markdown editors

Saltlane

I have a simple need - to have markdown work flawlessly on both MacOS and IOS. There are many flavours of markdown and I like to use Multimarkdown (MMD) as it is the most comprehensive. My use cases are:

  1. To be able to have inline images with the text1
  2. In preview, to be able to navigate to other markdown notes by clicking local2 or wiki links
  3. To support the same style of metadata (and hide it in preview) - either YAML style (separated by dashes) or MMD style (top of document with a blank line)

There are lots of markdown editors, but many either have their own flavour or support CommonMark (e.g. Typora) and don't have the full coverage of Multimarkdown but even this doesn't support Wiki links. Wiki Links are often a feature of individual editors.

Editor Local links Wiki links styles on image links MMD meta YAML meta IOS MacOS Flavour
IA writer No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes MMD
Typora Yes No No No Yes3 No Yes CommonMark
ByWord No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes MMD
Macdown Yes No No No No No Yes Hoedown
Marked 2 Yes Yes 4 Yes Yes Yes No Yes MMD
VSCode Yes No No No Yes No Yes CommonMark
MMD Composer No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes MMD
1Writer Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No MMD
DevonThink Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes? Yes 5 Yes MMD
Obsidian Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Obsidian

TextMate - uses Marked 2 for preview

My current set up is to use either DevonThink or Marked 2 on MacOS with MMD style metadata and 1Writer on IOS. My markdown documents are in the iCloud 1Writer folder and indexed into DevonThink.

Update June 2022: IA Writer now supports wikilnks but local links remain a problem.

  1. I find html embedded in markdown ugly and it makes the document difficult to read. Multimarkdown has a good solution using reference links with styles - [image ref]: \path_to\image.jpg style="float:left; width=50%;"  ↩

  2. Local is where the link reference is [document name](\path_to\document_name.md) not a http reference  ↩

  3. Shows as greyed block in preview  ↩

  4. Using custom pre-processor  ↩

  5. Documents have to be in a Devonthink database replicated to Devonthink to go  ↩