Markdown Live Preview Editor?
Solution 1
If you want to use TextMate, change your file's language association to 'HTML'. In the Preview window there is a drawer that offers the option pipe the text through 'Markdown.pl'. (See screenshot).
The alternative I use for Makrdown is not an officially released app but personally I use markdownlive by Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch. It's open source available on GitHub and will require you to compile it using Xcode. It also allows you to copy the Generated HTML (what I like to use it for quite a bit).
Solution 2
There is also "Mou", a live editor for Mac OS X (Lion). It's still in beta, but works great! http://mouapp.com/
When current available Markdown editors are almost all for general writers, Mou is different: It's for web developers. Syntax highlighting, live preview, fullscreen mode, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, incremental search, custom themes, HTML export, enhanced CJK characters support.
Solution 3
Mac only, Marked provides markdown and multi-markdown preview for any text editor. The preview is updated when you save the text file.
MarkdownPad is for Windows, but provides live preview.
ReText is available for other platforms and offers a live preview of rendered Markdown:
ReText is a simple text editor for Markdown syntax. It is written in Python using Qt libraries, able to run on any platforms (Linux and BSD are officially supported)
Although not officially supported, there are Windows installation instructions as well; however, I had to make a few modifications to get them to work (the complete set with my corrections is shown below):
Installation
- Install Python27
- Install PyQT precompiled for
PyQt-Py2.7-x86-gpl-4.8.3-1.exePyQt-Py2.7-x86-gpl-4.8.4-1.exe - Install easy_install setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe
- Update your My Computer's Environmental Variables. Click
Start
, right-clickMy Computer
and selectProperties
, select theAdvanced
tab, then clickEnvironment Variables
. - Under
System Variables
, clickNew
. Under variable name enterPYTHONPATH
. UnderVariable value
enterC:\Python27\Lib\;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\
- Select the System Variable
PATH
clickEdit
. Update the PATHvariable value
by addingC:\Python27;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\PyQt4\bin;
to the front of the existing entries so that it reads likePATH=C:\Python27;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\PyQt4\bin;...
- Install additional Python libraries. Select
Start
thenRun
, typecmd
thencd \python27\scripts
. Enter:easy_install Pygments
easy_install ElementTree
easy_install Markdown
easy_install gdata
- Download and unpack current ReText (ATM 0.8.1)
- Download and unpack ReText icons
- Place the unpacked icons into the ReText\icons folder
- Navigate to the retext.py file (probably at
c:\retext
). Right-click drag-and-drop retext.py and selectCreate shortcuts here
. - Right-click on the shortcut to adjust the properties.
- Change
target
to"C:\Python27\python.exe" retext.py
andRun
tominimized
. - Change the icon (which will require you to make an
.ico
file from one of the.png
files unzipped above into theReText/icons
directory, which can be done here - Change the shortcut name on the general tab if desired.
Solution 4
MarkdownLive does exactly what you want, free and open source.
Download the release through GitHub, or version 1.7.1 from here.
Solution 5
BBEdit does this out of the box: set the current document type to be Markdown, open Preview in BBEdit, and type away. The preview window auto-updates, showing your text just the way you want it.
See page 277 of the BBEdit User Manual for details.
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Brock Woolf
I am a software developer and university student based in Perth, Australia. I work on my own software projects in my spare time and write applications and games for iPhone and Mac OS X. You can see some of the software I've written here, or you can find out more about me and how to get in touch here.
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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Brock Woolf over 1 year
I am currently using
Textmate
to create Markdown documents, but it requires me to press CtrlOptionCmd + P everytime I want to 'update' the Markdown output window. Essentially I am using it like a word processor.Is there a Markdown editor for Mac OS X which supports wysiwig/live update of the content? Perhaps Textmate already does this?
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Admin about 12 yearsSearching the same for Linux, still this question is very useful (there are some portable programs listed here)
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Admin about 8 yearsThere are several editors with inline previewing/wysiwyg capabilities here: softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/5746/…
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Brock Woolf over 13 yearsI tried markdownlive. It works, but like you said its in development and is quite primitive in the way of syntax colouring. I will try you other method soon.
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yanokwa about 13 yearsyou do not have to set your file type to html. if you use the markdown bundle, you just need to remove the key equivalent activation of preview in the bundle settings. then textmate's show web preview in the window menu will give you a live preview.
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Rishabh Agrahari over 12 yearsWhat about multimarkdown?
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Thilo over 12 yearsMou looks great, but requires Lion.
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Matt Ball about 12 yearsYou don't have to build MarkdownLive yourself: github.com/rentzsch/markdownlive/downloads
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Simon Lehmann almost 12 yearsFor those who want to get Marked (which I really can recommend) and still have Snow Leopard (10.6), there is a free Snow Leopard only download available through the FAQ (marked.tenderapp.com/kb/documentation/…): assets.markedapp.com/MarkedSL.zip
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user72923 over 11 years+1 For @yanokwa's comment. I particularly like this fork of the markdown plugin, which nicely preserves things like indentation for unordered lists: github.com/fletcher/markdown.tmbundle
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Eric Hu about 11 yearsDo you mind sharing what you did to your $PATH?
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Zac Thompson almost 11 yearsbetter to list each of these as separate answers
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Rory O'Kane about 10 yearsWarning: the website buries the information that Texts is not free. You can use it only for 30 days before you must purchase a license.
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Per Quested Aronsson over 9 yearsTried it, but it could not open the md file...
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Seamus over 2 yearsApparently you are correct - thanks for the update. I don't even recall now how I concluded it was open source... perhaps something has changed? "Free during beta" has always been the case, but it's been beta for so long, I wondered if this was to become its perpetual state. But it appears now that beta will end "soon".
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Seamus over 2 yearsUgh! I like BBEdit for several reasons, but characterizing its ability to handle Markdown in a user-friendly way is a stretch. And BTW, your link is broken.