![]() ![]() Or you can use one of the many Markdown applications for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems. You can add Markdown formatting elements to a plaintext file using a text editor application. The screenshot below shows a Markdown file displayed in the Visual Studio Code text editor. It may take a while to get used to seeing Markdown syntax in your text, especially if you’re accustomed to WYSIWYG applications. Or to make a phrase bold, you add two asterisks before and after it (e.g., **this text is bold**). When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.įor example, to denote a heading, you add a number sign before it (e.g., # Heading One). In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Using Markdown is different than using a WYSIWYG editor. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages. Writing is always challenging, so anything that can help make the process more natural feeling, and more fluent, is welcome.Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. I’ve used it to create ebook anthologies really successfully.īut for most of my daily writing: poetry especially, but articles and reviews and long prose as well, I’ve settled on iA Writer as that well designed application that does what you want it to do, then stays the background and doesn’t demand your attention. Scrivener seems to be designed primarily for novelists and playwrights, and is a bit over-powered for writing individual poems, but ideal for putting together collections. There is some syntax highlighting which I only find vaguely useful (highlight adverbs in the current document and delete them all!) and quickly outputs to Word, PDF, and WordPress.įor longer pieces, iA Writer isn’t perfect, and for those things, and particularly for the creation of Epub files, I’ve recommended Scrivener for a while now. ![]() All your files are synced in the background and accessible via iCloud syncing that seems to just work. It doesn’t paralyse you with a thousand typographical choices and can be driven with some simple keyboard commands giving you access to other files and folders (Ctl-E) and a preview of the markdown (Ctl-R) It saves in plain text and you can use markdown commands. IA Writer is simple to use and good to look at. There’s a few that do most of these things, including Byword, but in the end I opted to go back to iA Writer, an app I’d enjoyed a while ago, and has come a long way since I last looked at it closely. Has a kind of distraction-free mode so that I can focus on just the text on the page and not tons of tool-bars, windows, pop-ups and buttons.Can be used on iPad, Mac and iPhone using some sort of cloud-based architecture (iCloud, Dropbox) with the main aim being I want to be able to pick up my writing on any device and just take up where I left off.Can output to my standard blog system ().Can output to standard file types: PDF, Word, etc.Can use simple markdown text commands (I know it’s a bit esoteric, but great if you prefer keyboard command typing and hands off the mouse).Writes and saves in plain text (.txt) format.Text is unlikely to go away.įor a while I was recommending the text editor Ulysses, but then it jumped the shark and wanted to start charging on a subscription basis (I’m even reluctant to use that model for huge,complex software bundles like Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office let alone a text editor), so I started looking around again for a writing tool that had to have the following essential qualities: txt files for poems that can be opened by a wide variety of programs. For example, I’ve had my poems all archived in a FileMaker Pro database for a long time, but it’s been crashing a bit lately and I began to worry again about having all that writing in a format I couldn’t access easily, and through a variety of software. I also didn’t want to end up with all my writing in a proprietary format, even one so seemingly ubiquitous as. It’s been a long time since I gave up on the souped-up MS Word to be that tool, and moved to applications that focused on distraction-free, minimalist approaches. One of the constant preoccupations of the procrastinating writer using technology, is finding he perfect writing program. ![]()
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