by Jason Snell
Typora: ‘Distraction-free Markdown’
At Fast Company, Jared Newman writes in praise of the $15 Markdown editor app Typora, which just exited a seven-year(!) beta:
[Typora developer] Abner says he started working on Typora to satisfy his own needs. He wanted a Markdown editor that didn’t display clunky syntax or require a separate preview window, and decided to create his own after failing to find any suitable options. It turns out a lot of other folks were looking for something similar. “The project has gone beyond my expectations,” he wrote via email.
Over the past seven years, Typora has become considerably faster and more stable, and it’s added new features such as diagrams, find-and-replace, word counts for selected text, and a “Focus Mode” that highlights the current paragraph. A recent update also added support for Arm-based Linux devices, so you can run it on cheap Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi micro-computers.
In the article, Jared mentions my preferences for Markdown editors that show the markup, rather than hide it. Typora has an interesting solution to the show-or-hide conundrum: it can optionally display the markup when you’re editing it—for example, if you click on an inline link it expands to reveal the URL—but will style your document without showing markup when you’re not. And there’s a Source Code Mode if you really want to see nothing but the pure Markdown markup.
Typora runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (alas, no iOS support) and seems like a very nice Markdown editing app. You can check it out at typora.io.