Markdown as wikipedia mentioned it, is a lightweight markup language with simple text formatting syntax. the syntax is easy to write, i use markdown for this blog also, confluence page, documents, readme etc. i love Markdown mindset essay.
And for using markdown essentially you don’t need an Editor if you remember all the syntax, but sometimes it is nice to use an editor for quick formatting and also exporting markdown document to other format like HTML, PDF (it’s depends on your editor basically), this list is not necessarily a review, i can comment with my own usage.
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Typora
Simple, that’s the word to describe it, i love it simplicity, to the point without hassle, but yet powerful, it can export to many format, easy to customise, easy to navigate, there’s focus mode or typewriter mode so you can focus on your writing. it consume around 100MB RAM or more if it do heavy text. -
Moeditor
It’s an electron based app, two pane, edit and preview, also with very simple design, simpler than Typora, there’s view button and menu, also have menu for different mode (write mode, read mode, etc), it’s resembling IAWriter from UI perspectives, and its simplicity is the huge benefit. can be exported to HTML and PDF, it consume around 60MB of RAM, so it’s quote fast. -
Macdown
it has two pane like Moeditor, edit and preview, it can be exported to HTML and PDF, the editor is quite straight forward, not much menu, there’s no focus mode, there’s fullscreen mode. it consumed around 70MB of RAM -
Bear
This editor is has much more feature then above, has advance mechanism to store content, support tagging, easy to navigate, on free tier, it can be exported to limited format, no PDF or HTML sadly, you can build workflow using Bear if you want to serious in writing, you subscribe to Bear service, you can have sync multi device, cloud storage and much more. -
Visual Studio Code
This one is not really markdown editor, but a code editor with markdown plugin added, i use this a lot when wants to publish my blog, i edit most of my Jekyll theme and blog content using VSC, integrated with terminal, so i can push to GitHub directly.
For me, i use Typora mostly for all purpose one-off markdown editing, manage my journal in Bear, i also write my blog entry on Bear, and passed to VSC if i satisfy with the content.