When I decided to learn and use Markdown as my daily note-taking method, I realized there are too many editors and not all of them are handy or easy to use. So I tried what I can found on Windows platform in the Internet to find who is the best. Here is my recommendation.
Atom
- With its neat and fashion theme, Atom seems to be a great Markdown editor.
- But actually it can’t render Markdown into pages so you don’t know what’s your writting looks like despite it can recognize Markdown format and many other programming languages.
- So it’s a great code editor but a Markdown editor.
CMD Markdown
- This app has an easy understanding interface.
- It provides both web and PC version with same functions.
- Many functions require Pro membership, which is very unconvenient, especially picture uploading. If you can’t upload local pics, your rich-text editing will be very incomplete. Other important/wonderful functions are not free such as exporting to HTML with CSS, exporting to PDF, exporting to Evernote.
- “Post as an URL” is free, which is astonishing.
- Anyway, if you like it after you try it, you can consider buy its membership, after all, it performs well.
Farbox
- This is a very interesting app whose provider offers not only app but also a lot of services such as weblog with Markdown, deep syncing with Wechat and syncing with Dropbox.
- It’s really neat even simple.
- It suits for people who don’t like too much setting to use services.
- You should pay for standard membership or Pro membership for many useful functions.
MarkdownPad 2
- During my searching I was told this app is probably best on Windows platform. I was intrigued and tried it.
- But unfortunately, it can’t perform right. Its preview column is totally crashed on Windows 10 because the rendering engine “awesomium” doesn’t work at all, even after I tried what the offical website Q&A told.
- Its “notepad” style makes new users feel familiar and friendly. If it works on your OS, it’s not bad to use it.
MarkEditor
- This app comes from the provider who made Farbox. So they are very similar.
- You still need to pay for more functions.
Miu
- You can consider it as an open-source version of Mou on macOS.
- Extremely neat and simple look. But apparently it doesn’t provide too many functions.
Sublime Text 3
- A famous cross-platform Coding editor which is highly convenient and smart with code.
- Similar to Atom, it doesn’t provide real-time preview which is the most important function for Markdown.
Typora
- Extremely neat, elegant and powerful. It’s unbelievable that it’s free!
- What you see is what you get. It discarded traditional two-columns architecture of Markdown editor, which gives you a great experience.
- It can export more than 10 formats.
- I strongly recommand it.
Xiao shu jiang/小书匠/Story Writer
- It has a powerful interface and various functions and settings. However, it doesn’t look ugly. It looks fine.
- It’s a cross-platform app including web version.
- It’s totally free.
- It’s so powerful that it even could be a Blog writer. Now I’m writing this blog with it.
- It supports many cloud-storage services even including github, evernote and imgur! Amazing!
- It provides more than 30 themes of interface.
- It can import and export tons of formats.
- I highly recommand it.
About the links
- Restricted to time, I didn’t provides the official website of them. But you can find them easily via Google.
- Good Luck! Hope you can find your own comfortable Markdown tool.
- If you know more Markdown tools which are not listed here, please drop me a line, or leave your comment. I’m very glad to try them. Thanks.