If you are like me, then you have probably had little experience with and was possibly slightly intimidated with the thought of having to write in markdown. Well, I knew I wanted as much help with this as possible to make sure my blog posts get to the professional look and feel that bespeaks the quality I hope to achieve in writing and other content production. One of the helps I needed was a good markdown tool for both my Mac notebook, and my home PC running Windows.

• First, I want a dual screen, so I an see a live preview of what my markdown is looking like.
• Second, I want helpful tools for easily adding markdown features I may not remember.
• Third, I wanted something that could help me maintain a document library of original markdown files for my posts.

After some time searching, I found Markdown Monster.
While this is not free software (39.00 USD), it does offer a free download and free trial.

Markdown Monster Features

MM meets all my requirements with a couple of caveats that we will discuss later. It has a lovely user interface with dual windows that allow real time preview. It also has different themes to select, but I really like this default 'github'theme with the markdown page in reverse 'dark' theme, and the preview page in white.

MM has useful tools for helping those just learning Markdown. Adding basic formatting like bold text, italic or struck out text can either be done from the line itself or with hot keys ctl-b for bold, or from the formatting bar at the top of the screen.

File management is very nice with a folder tray that you can bring up on screen, and a TAB feature that lets you work on more than one post at a time (I really like this).

There are some features that I will have to get used to. I mean, I like them, but will have to pay attention. The way MM handles line breaks is one of these.

Line Continuation

The demo page says "By default Markdown adds paragraphs at double line breaks. Single line breaks by themselves are simply wrapped together into a single line. If you want to have soft returns that break a single line, add two spaces at the end of the line." I guess I will remember this when I see an output that I was not expecting.

Screen Capture

MM has thought about the user experience and what you need to have at hand as you are working on content. For example, it has a built in screen capture feature which is great to help keep you in the app and focused on content.

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Not working (yet?) Fontawesome Icons and Syntax Highlighting

Ok, honestly, I did not even know about 'fontawesome icons' before looking at Markdown Monster. It looks really cool, but unfortunately these are not currently rendered in Steemit. The MM Help Builder feature includes a custom syntax for FontAwesome icons in its templates. You could automatically embed these icons without full HTML syntax if this feature worked in Steemit. Hopefully this will come in future hard-forks.

MM also has a cool code snippit feature which offers syntax highlighting that can easily be done, and supports HTML, C#, and several other languages, but this currently does not seem to render in Steemit.

Caveats

There were two things that stuck out for me that might give someone pause at adopting this app into their workflow.

Cut and Paste. First, I had issues with cut and paste. It seems like the cut content does not go into the buffer, and then the paste shows what was previously entered. This caused me to make a mistake and loose some content. I guess I'll have to hit the 'undo' button.

NO UNDO button! That is right, there is actually no undo button anywhere to be found. I looked for five minutes because I thought I was clearly missing something, but nope, it is actually not there. This is clearly a major oversight that most folks like myself really would like to see.

I went into settings and turned on autosave to help get around this, and for cut and paste, I'm using copy paste instead, and then deleting the copied text after the fact.

Conclusion

Right now Markdown Monster gets three out of five stars from SquareLink Review.

I do really like this app and think it may become my default Windows based Markdown tool. It has awesome clean looking easy to navigate documentation to help new users. MM provides me with a dual windown/live preview experience I really like, and includes features like a tool-bar for formatting, built in screen capture, great document management, and much more.

There are caveats as we have seen that keep me from recommending this to everyone. The problem with cut and paste, and the lack of an undo button are both easy to work around, but in a product that costs $39 USD, the functionality is expected to be there and working.

@phaazer1 [SquareLink]
If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.

Please add any questions, comments, or other ideas below, I would love to hear from you.
Also, Your Up-votes are always appreciated if you appreciate the work! First comment gets an upvote as well.