Finally... A Text Editor That Speaks MultiMarkdown!

Available now on the Mac App Store!!

Introducing MultiMarkdown Composer

MultiMarkdown Composer is a text editor for Mac that is designed from the ground up around the MultiMarkdown Syntax. It is designed to make writing in MultiMarkdown even easier than it already is, with automatic syntax highlighting, built in previews, easy export to any format that is supported by MultiMarkdown, and more!

By using an editor built around MultiMarkdown, you can focus on the actual writing, rather than worrying about formatting and styles. Let the computer deal with that when you’re ready to export your document to another format.

Syntax Highlighting as You Type

MultiMarkdown Composer incorporates work by Ali Rantakari that parses your document as you type, providing syntax highlighting for your document built from the same PEG used in MultiMarkdown itself. This allows you to know ahead of time how MultiMarkdown is going to interpret your document, to help you focus on writing!

Customizable Themes

MultiMarkdown Composer includes several built-in themes based on Solarized by Ethan Schoonover. You can also design your own themes to customize the appearance of MultiMarkdown Composer to suit your needs.

Instant Previews

MultiMarkdown Composer can show you a preview of how your document will look when converted by MultiMarkdown to HTML. It even respects the syntax setting, so you can enable or disable the MultiMarkdown specific features at will.

Better yet — if you have Brett Terpstra’s Marked application installed, you can choose to have your plain text files previewed using Marked instead of the built-in preview window. Marked adds the ability to select various themes as well as other features.

While the built-in preview is not as full-featured as Marked (why reinvent the wheel?), it does support all of the features of MultiMarkdown itself, including custom CSS, support for MathJax, images, links, etc.

Instant Navigation Through Longer Documents

When writing longer documents, it’s easy to lose your place when you’re jumping back and forth between chapters, sections, etc. MultiMarkdown Composer automatically builds a Table of Contents from the headers in your document, creating an instant outline of your document. Open the Table of Contents drawer, and you easily jump right the section of your document you need.

Assisted Editing

MultiMarkdown Composer is designed to help you format your documents quickly and easily, including assisted editing features such as:

• Automatic formatting of list entries when hitting ‘enter’ while inside a list
• Automatically apply “smart pairs” of characters that need to remain together — for example putting something in quotes, brackets, or parentheses
• Easy creation and alignment of tables — simply include the ‘|’ separator, and your table will jump to alignment
• Automatic metadata alignment — MultiMarkdown Composer keeps your metadata aligned to make it easier to read
• Automatically “close” header syntax by appending with the proper number of “#” characters
• Indent and outdent your lines with a simple keystroke — great for re-organizing lists
• Automatically create a link when you paste a URL from the clipboard “onto” a selection from your document
• Preferences to enable/disable these features as desired
• And much more!

Export Directly From Your Editor

MultiMarkdown Composer supports exporting immediately to any supported MultiMarkdown output format:

• HTML
• LaTeX
• Flat OpenDocument (.fodt)
• OPML (read and write support)
• RTF (with limitations)

There’s even an advanced setting to allow you to pipe your document on export to the shell command of your choice to create custom export workflows.

Compatible with the ODB Editor protocol

MultiMarkdown Composer is compatible with the ODB Editor protocol, originally created by the authors of BBEdit. It allows various applications to use Composer to edit your text for you. For example, Jesse Grosjean’s QuickCursor allows you to edit text in almost any application with MultiMarkdown Composer.

A Text Editor That Can Finally Print

Have you ever tried printing from some of the other well-known text editors out there? Despite all their bells and whistles, getting them to print on a piece of paper can become a herculean task. MultiMarkdown Composer simply does what you expect — apply the font and theme you have selected, and make your document fit nicely on a piece of paper. Nothing fancy, but sometimes that’s exactly what you want. Choose a colorful theme to emphasize different elements of your document, or choose a plain theme to focus on the content.

Need Markdown Compatibility?

You can instantly toggle back and forth between MultiMarkdown’s native and compatibility modes, enabling you to remain compatible with the original Markdown syntax for those times you only want the basics. Switch back, and you once again have access to the many features that MultiMarkdown offers, including metadata, footnotes, tables, and much, much more!

Lion Compatibility

MultiMarkdown Composer will run on Mac OS 10.6 and 10.7. When running on Lion, the following additional features are enabled:

• Resume — MMDC will pick back up where you left off when you quit and restart the application

• Auto Save — Lion will save your MMDC documents periodically while you work, even if you forget

• Versions — Lion will save new versions of your file periodically so that you can go back to a previous version of your work after you’ve changed it

• Full Screen Mode — work on your document in full screen to minimize distractions and focus on the task at hand

Support for mmd_merge

If you use the mmd_merge command to split your longer documents into separate files, MultiMarkdown Composer can open your index file and then compile it into the finished file so you can see it all at once.