It appears to only be distributed as a web app. Apples and oranges. Also the editor looks like a code editor (Erato also kind of does, but it has a margin and it doesn't have line numbers by default).
I wonder if Erato is also just using the Ace editor as that preview on the side looks like a webview. If they did that's cool, but then this basically the same thing as Dillinger.
Erato has a more flexible window layout than Mou, and provides some nice editor shortcuts that programmers are used to (e.g. better identation features and block autocomplete).
Erato doesn't change the text size in the editor window, just in the live preview window. Mou is clever in this regard but its cleverness that doesn't improve the experience IMHO.
on top of that Mou supports custom styles, which I see no mention of from Erato. I happily donated to Mou, and really don't see why anyone would choose Erato over it.
Same setup. People interested in markdown only editors must be writers which don't edit any other format.
Otherwise, I don't get why you would bother learning several pieces of software, and each probably lacking many features of Sublime or other powerful text editors.
It drives me nuts that iA Writer has created a "Markdown" editor that only supports a subset of Markdown, despite the fact MD has hardly any features to begin with.
All of these (Erato, Mou, MarkdownLive) have noticeable lag while editing. I get that you have to parse and render the markdown, but with todays computing power, is it too much to ask to see the text I just typed as soon as I press the keys?
This is especially bad when there are images on the page. Why not just render the current block and leave the rest of the page as is.
When you say +bugs do you mean you introduced some bugs? :-P
Thanks for the link btw, I've been using Mou and, being as I am, I always like to read source code while learning, so I really appreciate open source apps.
Why does this, and other markdown editors, use a fixed width font? It would be nice to have a variable width font by default and a quick toggle button or menu item to switch to a fixed width font.
Erato uses a fixed-width font because it is easy to read and makes formatting very clear. You can change the font in the Settings. I like your idea of a toggle though, I'll give it some thought and see how it might work.
You see, on the one hand I think this is kind of admirable. Yay, I type my markdown over here and I can instantly see the bits I got wrong over there.
But I also can't help thinking, if you're going to all that effort why not go full WYSIWYG, with Markdown as the file format? (You'd need some kind of support for merge markers I suppose, I guess that'd be kind of tricky.)
You know what it reminds me of? Wordperfect 5.1's Reveal Codes :-)
Trying this out now, It's actually pretty nice. I get that It's a visual editor that uses Markdown as a storage format, but it still would be nice if it would actually let me type Markdown - interestingly it seems to be pretty indecisive on whether or not I should be able to that.
I can type a # and it will automatically turn the text into a Title which is nice, but any other Markdown-like syntax is printed verbatim, which is odd because when I save and reload it will suddenly render it as Markdown just fine.
If I could write Markdown in this and had some way to refresh the editor to visualize it as an alternative to the insert bindings, personally I'd be sold on this for sure.
Something I've been looking for for a while: A Markdown WYSIWYG. I personally dislike WYSIWYG, but for clients, it cannot be beaten. Now, most things that clients do in CMSs can be done with Markdown, and it avoids complications with weird HTML output, them trying to do unconventional styling (aka "ruining the website). So something like CKEditor or TinyMCE but outputting Markdown, and constrained to Markdown's limitations.
I want to totally abolish two window mode and all uncertainties about how the output will look like. my target the same as yours, to make the learning curve less steep.
For Linux folks out there, try ReText http://sf.net/projects/retext/ It is an editor for Markdown and reStructuredText. There is syntax highlighting and a live preview mode. The app is written with the Qt library (so it probably looks best in KDE), but it works and looks fine in Gnome.
This is nice. I use Byword which doesn't have monospaced fonts for code blocks, but does the preview right in the editor. It's nice for non-code related markdown stuff.
Can you change the title to:
Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor for Mac
Markdown is used on many systems and not everyone is intrested in reading about Mac software.
Also, it is open source: https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger