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Do you know any editor for Mac OSX that helps with editing Github flavored markdown?

I think Mou ( http://mouapp.com/ ) is fine, only that its just plain markdown and not Github markdown.

Please, this is a question about Github flavored Markdown, and not about plain Markdown!! for example I think javascript syntax highlighting is really nice. not only does Mou not support it, it also destroys the layout of the code.

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6 Answers 6

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I know this is an old question, but you should check out MacDown!

The author based it on Mou but added all the features it is missing like Github Flavored Markdown and more.

enter image description here

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    This should be the accepted answer! I love Mou, but I hate that it doesn't do GHFM. This one looks almost perfect for GHFM, and it's based on Mou, so that's even better. Thanks for your answer!
    – mhulse
    Aug 29, 2014 at 4:32
  • +1 for a great editor, viewer and exporter! I'm especially happy with the code block syntax highlighting feature. Thanks for pointing this app out!
    – Dolan Antenucci
    Sep 2, 2014 at 19:36
  • I like the idea, but on my OS X 10.8.5 mac mini, the syntax highlighting just does not work. Not even in the help file. The scrolling is wrong too. The visible area doesn't match the visible area on the right. Just the .contentOffset is synchronized, when the .contentOffset of the left scrollview changes. So I'll stick with Mou for the moment... Or maybe I'll fix it some day: MacDown seems to be open source...
    – Michael
    Sep 18, 2014 at 7:31
  • The author is very active when it comes to fixing bugs. I submitter a few issues on the projects git hub page and it was all fixed in a few days.
    – victmo
    Oct 2, 2014 at 9:26
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Atom

GitHub created a new open-sourced editor called Atom that provides a built-in real-time Markdown Preview.

Fire it up with Control+Shift+m and you'll get a great experience that looks similar to this (except with your own Atom theme applied):

Screenshot of Atom with the Markdown Preview window open.

Atom uses packages to provide plugin functionality. Read more about the Markdown Package on Github.

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  • Perfect. Absolutely perfect. TY!
    – Brian Genisio
    Sep 3, 2014 at 18:25
  • Atom is awesome, but it doesn't do any Markdown syntax highlighting. That alone is enough reason to use MacDown instead: macdown.uranusjr.com
    – rinogo
    Dec 16, 2014 at 19:51
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    @JoshPinter yes see: github.com/atom/markdown-preview.
    – Dan Rosenstark
    May 12, 2016 at 20:17
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    @DanRosenstark Great, thanks! There is also an option to Break On Single Newline, which is part of Github's special markdown.
    – Joshua Pinter
    May 12, 2016 at 21:47
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    @DanRosenstark It's not on by default but you can check it off in the markdown-preview package options as well. Brilliant little package. Makes creating READMEs so easy.
    – Joshua Pinter
    May 13, 2016 at 18:46
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+100

If you use Emacs, markdown-mode.el offers a mode for Github-flavored Markdown.

(If you don't use Emacs, you're probably not well advised to pick it up just for this sole purpose. It isn't so much a text editor, as a virtual Lisp machine in which has been implemented a text editor whose conventions are quite unlike those of any other such tool; Emacs in fact has its own standard library, which in the current release (version 24.3, March 2013), weighs in at 172M of source. There is nothing you can do in any other text editor which you can't do in Emacs, often more quickly and efficiently; the trade-off is that, depending on your purpose, you will first need to spend anywhere from several days to several years first acquiring expertise in the use of Emacs.)

I had hoped the Mou developer would show the good sense of implementing a reasonably general parser which could accept a language specification, in order that his code could eventually support more dialects of Markdown than just the canonical one. Were that true, it would be trivial to modify Mou for Github-flavored Markdown -- but, regrettably, on examining the app bundle's contents, I find this appears not to be the case.

Covering what I understand to be the popular OS X editors, TextMate can apparently be made to support Github-flavored Markdown. I gather there is also a Github-flavored Markdown plugin for Sublime Text's newer versions, although why anyone would want to pay $70 for such a fundamental capability as text editing is beyond me. BBEdit doesn't seem to have a module, or at least I can't find one via Google, but does anyone use BBEdit any more anyway? And, finally, you'd really expect there would be a plugin for Xcode, but I haven't been able to find one for that, either.

And, finally, examining a slightly different approach, Marked is an OS X-native Markdown previewer which has Github-flavored Markdown parsing built in; the way this works is, you edit the Markdown source in the editor of your choice, and Marked updates its rendering of the file to show you what the result will look like. I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it might be of use. (Sure, it costs money, but $4 won't even buy you a deck of smokes or a gallon of gas these days, so it's not like it costs enough to care about.)

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  • I actually just bought Marked, but here's a bit warning: Marked is NOT an editor, it is only a previewer! That said, it does indeed look very promising. However, I'm having problems getting it to work with Docter. I also looked at Mou, and while it does look very nice, and I like the side-by-side editing in one app, the fact that there's no way to get it to support the Github flavor is pretty much non-starter for me.
    – Daniel Schaffer
    Jul 26, 2013 at 18:04
  • @DanielSchaffer Thanks for the heads-up; I've edited the question. I don't know what Docter is, but there being a TextMate plugin for Github-flavored Markdown, I'd say that that editor by itself, or that editor plus Marked for live preview, is likely your best option. (Of course, for my own purposes I'd just use Emacs. One of the nicer things about that editor is that, being as self-sufficient as it is, it's only very rarely affected by the vagaries of its host; I use it on OS X, Linux, and Windows, and it behaves identically in all cases. But, like most Emacs users, I'm also mildly insane. :)
    – Aaron Miller
    Jul 26, 2013 at 18:48
  • I'm using markdown-mode.el 2.0 with emacs 24.3.1 on Ubuntu 12.04. Is there any way to get gfm-mode to syntax highlight within fenced code blocks? (e.g. Python syntax highlighting within a Python fenced code block)
    – Charl Botha
    Apr 6, 2014 at 9:54
  • @CharlBotha Not to my knowledge; this is a special case of the general problem involved in simultaneously applying multiple major modes to a single buffer, and while there are several libraries purporting to do that, I've never found any of them to work well. (It's been a couple of years since I tried any of them, though; the state of the art may have advanced since I lost interest.)
    – Aaron Miller
    Apr 6, 2014 at 23:20
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    Thank you @AaronMiller -- I ended up trying out mmm-mode and polymode and then wrote this blog post: vxlabs.com/2014/04/08/…
    – Charl Botha
    Apr 8, 2014 at 7:28
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You should definitely try StackEdit. I personally love it and stay with it after having tried Mou, Atom, all kind of editor/ide plugins etc.

StackEdit is a free, open-source Markdown editor based on PageDown, the Markdown library used by Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites.

Read the complete feature list here.

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There are stylings for vim that support github markdown. I'm taking vim as an example here because I'm a vim user, but I suspect there are comparable plugins / styles for other text editors.

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If you don't mind running the markdown editor as a local HTML file inside your browser, consider downloading jbt/markdown editor. There a preview of how it works here. I downloaded the source, and now just double click the HTML file every time I want to edit markdown files. It supports some interesting features like pressing ctrl+s to save as a .md file, supports dragging / dropping files into the browser to edit them, etc.

Should you ever want to get the HTML generated by the editor, (using Firefox) I select the all generated HTML on the right of the editor -> right click -> view selection source.

enter image description here

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