The other day I discovered MacDown, a markdown client for Mac. Since I work at a software consultancy that heavily utilizes jekyll and markdown for day to day communication, this was a godsend.
Why use MacDown?
In general, you have to push up your README.md files or any of your blog posts to see them fully formatted. That can be a pain in the ass when you’re trying to check formatted lists, bullets, code, whatever in Github markdown.
So instead, use MacDown and view/edit your changes immediately. The split makes it easy to keep track of your source if you like the markdown editor.
But that wasn’t good enough. MacDown has a CLI integration, which you can see here. Esentially the app ships with a binary your can use and symlink to create a global command. Here’s the docs on that -> Scroll a little less than halfway.
The docs will tell you to create a symlink like so:
sudo ln -s /Applications/MacDown.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/macdown /usr/bin
Running the above command failed for me, with “permission denied”. And really I prefer to manage these symlinks via aliases in my .zshrc, so I ended up with this nice little alias:
# macdown
alias md="/Applications/MacDown.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/macdown"
# usage is simple
md <file>
Now I just use md <file> to open it up in MacDown. I love it.