What is Markdown?
According to Wikipedia:
Markdown is a lightweight markup language originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, which seeks to achieve maximum readability and "publishability" in both its input and output forms, taking inspiration from many existing conventions for marking emails using plain text .
People who are dedicated to writing (whether they are journalists, bloggers, etc.) should know how Markdown works because basically, it allows us to write content with style without taking our hands off the keyboard, and although at first it may be somewhat complex or heavy understand, once we understand how it works, we cannot separate ourselves from this way of writing.
In the following link, you can see how the Markdown syntax. Next I will show 5 tools that we can install in GNU / Linux that will allow us to use Markdown in a simple way.
springseed
springseed it's one of my favorite editors to write using Markdown when I just need to do that quickly.
It has a minimalist and quite simple interface, and it allows us to add notes according to some categories that it already has predetermined, which we can rename or delete if we want. As is logical, we can also add others.
Springseed allows us to put a selected text in bold, italic or add a title through a pop-up menu, in addition to showing us a word counter in the lower right part and it has auto-saved documents, but does not include a spell checker. Let's look for more options than those, what we can do is synchronize our documents with our Dropbox account.
Springseed is Open Source under MIT license. You can download it for Ubuntu 13.10 onwards on their website for 32 and 64 bits, and it weighs around 50Mb.
or they can install it in ArchLinux via AUR.
$ yaourt -S springseed
remarkable
Remarkable stands out for many things. First of all, its small size (just over 70Kb per .deb), which gives it a lot of speed compared to the competition, and it has a lot of options, even many more than springseed, For example.
Among the advantages of Remarkable we have:
- Spelling checker.
- Export to PDF and HTML.
- Support for mathematical formulas with MathJax.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Buttons at the top with quick actions to style, add links, images, etc.
Perhaps the only one that the application has is that its interface is only in English, although the options in the tools menu are quite clear. Remarkable also has a line, word and letter counter.
From their website we can download a binary for .deb and .rpm distros:
or we can install it from AUR if we use Archlinux:
$ yaourt -S remarkable
cutemarked
cutemarked is another application that stands out for its low weight and interesting options, in fact it is my favorite right now. On the one hand, it doesn't have a letter counter, but you do have the number of lines on the left side and a word counter at the bottom.
An application written in Qt, multiplatform and that has among its options:
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Spelling checker.
- Functionality extension through Snippets.
- Full Screen mode for distraction-free typing.
- Export to HTML and PDF.
- Style and customization of the interface.
- Syntax highlighting, among other options.
You can get the binaries for installation (and instructions) on their website:
or they can install it from AUR:
$ yaourt -S cutemarked
haroopad
haroopad It's a heavyweight among Markdown editors, and not just because of its literal weight (about 40Mb), but because of the amount of options it has. Let's mention some of them:
- Markdown autocomplete.
- Support for extensions.
- Import content from YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, Slideshare, Flickr, Instagram, Soundcloud, Wikipedia, Pastebin
- Export in various formats: WordPress, Tumblr, MediaWiki, EPub, ReStructured Text, RTF.
- It has a lot of themes, and many other options
Of all the editors, it is the one that offers the most options when it comes to inserting Markdown code, and the customization capacity it has for "almost everything" makes it the best option right now if we dedicate ourselves to writing professionally.
We can download it from their website for Windows, OS X and Debian:
or we can install it from AUR:
$ yaourt -S haroopad
AtomEditor
Atom publisher was announced with much fanfare as the Sublime Text Killer And although it took a while, and at first it was only by invitation, it can already be downloaded from their website.
Actually I was a bit disappointed after installing it because by default it does not have code autocompletion, but, my goal is not to do an Atom Review now, but to highlight that if we write with Markdown code in it, we can launch a preview and it works quite well.
We can download it from its website:
or we can install it from AUR:
$ yaourt -S atom-editor-bin
There may be other tools as good as these, and if so, can you tell me which ones in the comments, but I think these 5 can meet the needs of the most demanding users.
The bad thing about Remarkable is that it is not opensource.
It would be missing the (in my opinion) best of all. Also «made in Spain»:
http://www.atareao.es/ubuntu/utext-mi-editor-markdown-actualizado-y-simplificado/
It doesn't look bad .. I'll take a look at it 😀
I've been looking at its license and apparently it is distributed under MIT, which in theory is free software. If I'm wrong, you tell me. 🙂
Actually being plain text you can use any editor, it is still good to have more options if you write a lot but markdown is very simple and generally you don't need much. As I use brackets to work, I also write in markdown with it, it has syntax highlighting and there is an extension to preview. If I have to export it to PDF or another format I use pandoc to convert it.
Yep, I just saw the extension in Brackets, I tried it and it looks good, what happens is that you have to save the file as .md, otherwise the preview option does not appear. Thanks for the information.
Well, it works for me with other extensions too, txt or markdown for exampleb
Thank you very much, something like that I was looking for a remarkable use time but then I stopped using it, as I use atom to make code I think I'll try to get the most out of it, I just want them to connect to ghost and from there to create new posts xD
I'm glad the post has served you.
Coincidentally I was preparing a post focused on the introduction of the light markup "Markdown and ReStructuredTex", for this purpose I am using ReText, which has 2 editing modes, exports to HTML, PDF, ODT, spell checker and some other things.
Remarkable recommended it to me @nano and I really liked it, I'm going to try CuteMarkEd to see how it goes.
Greetings.
Actually the best, it is more complete than those I presented in this post is Haroopad, because for example, if we are making a list with the syntax:
+item 1
+item 2
When we go to the next item, put the + again, and to get out we only have to give two Enter. For that and for other things.
But in particular I like CuteMarkEd better.
I am the only one who continues to use bluefish on linux and notepad ++ on windows for these tasks ... I must upgrade, I will keep an eye on remarkable, which caught my attention
Hey.
You are not the only one who needs to update. That we know we are already 2
You forget to name two required editors, and that I suppose everyone takes for granted: Vim and Emacs 😉
I don't even mention those two ... what are they not supposed to do? hahaha, they do everything ... that's why I don't even mention them.
of course in addition to this markup language emacs has org, which not only seems very comfortable to me but also has countless uses, not to touch that html crap again.
Excellent article, just something, the link in the name of "Atom" leads to the Haroopad page. Regards!
Oh! Thanks for the correction, I had not noticed.
I am tempted to go to markdown for everything I write. I think twice because almost 90% of what I write is intended for the press, not for the web, but the wonderful thing about markdown is that, since it is plain text, it can be exported practically for whatever you want. But hey, thanks for the applications, maybe I would be more encouraged with one that suits me.
By the way, there is another interesting project called Qute: http://www.inkcode.net/qute
Let's see what they think.
Actually the original Markdown syntax is this: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax the GitHub thing are small additions.
Definitely, I think the best option is haroopad.
Hello good day!
First of all, highlight the excellent work you do with your website.
Long ago I had the curiosity of the latex editor: LYX
Could you tell me, for people who do not understand much, but want to write, what advantages are there between the editors that you comment on in this article, and LYX, or if they are comparable? Or if they have nothing to do with it? What advantages would it offer for those who want to learn, choose one of these options.
Let's say that for the ordinary user, some editors like LYX stand out as an option to dedicate themselves to writing and not worry about much else.
Getting started with Markdown editors will bring some advantages over LYX, maybe I'm comparing things that are not for the same?
I ask you from my ignorance, and since you are very good with articles, I thought it would be good to raise some approach on the user who does not understand and wants to write, sees options, but does not really know what they would contribute and where to lean, they just want to write.
Gracias y saludos.
Get started with
I found Markdown looking for a simpler alternative to Latex. Latex syntax is more complex but also much more powerful, depending on what type of documents you are going to create Markdown can serve you. I like how the PDFs generated by Latex look like so I write in Markdown and with pandoc I export to PDF through latex (this is done automatically by the program). Pandoc is a command line program that converts between different markup languages.
Markdown syntax is super simple and you can see how your document will look live. I think this preview is usually shown in html and it may be different if you export to other formats but it serves as a guide.
I installed Remarkable but the spell checker does not work, do I have to do any additional configuration?
Greetings and excellent article, Markdown makes things faster and simpler.