I am using MacDown, which seems perfectly adequate. But it is Intel-only and hasn’t been updated in years (since 2022, it seems). So it will be going away in a few years unless it is updated.
I don’t tend to use Markdown, but I just asked Claude to archive some reference sites and it saved them in .md format.
What app do others use?
There are numerous options, some a 2-pane, some WYSIWYG, and there are free, pay and subscription options. And some output to websites like Wordpress and Ghost. Maybe you could narrow down what you use Markdown for and what you want to pay.
I have several apps on my Mac, ranging from Ulysses to MWeb to Drafts to BBedit, the last two having free tiers. They have different functions for me.
MacDown 3000 is the successor to MacDown and has frequent updates. I use it when I want a dual pane. But mostly I use Typora.
My use of markdown is very basic - either for note taking or keeping chunks of web pages. I don’t think there is any reason for you to move away from MacDown (update to MacDown 3000) unless you think you are missing something or just want to explore.
I hand-edit Markdown text with a text editor. I usually use GNU Emacs, and I’ve installed the markdown-mode package in order to get appropriate indentation and syntax highlighting.
For viewing/previewing the results, I have installed the Markdown Viewer extension into Firefox. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough for my purposes.
On my Linux PCs, I also use the Grip utility. This creates a light-duty web server designed to render Markdown into HTML and serve it. It includes enough smarts so it and your web browser will re-render the page whenever the Markdown file changes.
So when I’m making non-trivial changes to Markdown files, I’ll open it in Emacs on one side of my screen and point a web browser at Grip’s server on the other side of the screen, allowing me to see rendered text change every time I save changes to the file.
That having been said, I also know that BBEdit has a Markdown editor/viewer mode. I tried it briefly, but since I normally don’t use BBEdit at all, I can’t give any meaningful commentary about it.
I write my prompts to Claude in Markdown using Drafts. As well as opening md files received from Claude. Drafts has macOS and iOS apps. It has highly configurable syntax highlighting. I use BBEdit a lot, and if I had not used Drafts for Markdown, I would have used BBEdit.
I primarily use Ulysses, but BBedit and Drafts have their roles too.
I use BBEdit and Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Code (VSC). BBEdit handles Markdown files well and has a relatively crude preview capability (Markup > Preview in BBEdit). VSC has a much nicer preview feature, but finding it is not intuitive (in my opinion). Open the Markdown file in a new tab, right-click on the tab’s file name, and midway down the long menu is an option to Open Preview. Selecting this opens a new tab with a nice preview of the file. You can also add a Markdown linter and other tools via VSC extensions. Overall, I much prefer using BBEdit, but VSC is my preferred app for Markdown. [Off topic, but VSC also provides a nice front-end to Git.]
I was recommended One Markdown. To be honest I’ve barely touched it, but it’s highly rated and seems easy to use.
I must have seven Markdown editors… BBedit, Nova, SublimeText, MarkEdit, MarkDownload, Marked.
And I mostly use MacDown 3000 for my daily tasks…
It can be found here https://macdown.app or with brew install --cask macdown-3000
Obsidian is a great library-based markdown editor. It’s cross-platform, so not very mac-assed, but it works well and has a lot of plug-in facilities which let you do a lot beyond simple text editing.
IA Writer. Elegant, works really well, has a Library function, can organise etc.
I like MarkEdit a lot. I think this bit in the Readme says it best:
It’s just like TextEdit on Mac but dedicated to
Markdown.
I moved to Obsidian too. It’s what the cool vibe coding kids are using anyway.
The biggest problem I have with markdown is looking at that awful raw syntax. I don’t want one utility to edit the raw Markdown and another window for a preview.
Obsidian makes the syntax vanish (like Notion) when you move away from the line.
On my Mac, I use Paper by Mihhail Lapushkin of Tallinn.
Marvelous. It has been worth paying for. It’s the first place I start writing pretty much everything these days.
I noticed while grabbing a download of the latest LibreOffice for Mac 26.2.3 that the developers have added import and export support for Markdown!
LibreOffice 26.2 supports Markdown