Markdown Editor is on every platform now
What started as a browser extension I built for myself now runs on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Mac, iPad and iPhone, and it is built by a team at Coffee & Fun rather than just me.
It started because textareas are bad
Markdown Editor began as a thing I built for myself. I was writing a lot of markdown in places that were not built for it: GitHub issues, pull request descriptions, Twitch panels, CMS boxes. All of them give you a plain textarea and wish you luck. You write, you guess, you hit preview, you go back and fix the list you broke.
So I put a real editor in the textarea instead. Live preview, a toolbar, keyboard shortcuts. Nothing clever, just the thing that should have been there.
The last time I wrote about it was when the Safari version hit number 26 in Developer Tools on the App Store. That was a nice afternoon. A fair bit has happened since.
It is a Coffee & Fun product now
The biggest change is not in the app. It is that I am not the only one building it.
Markdown Editor is developed under Coffee & Fun LLC now, with an actual team behind it: releases that do not depend on me having a free evening, support that gets answered, a roadmap that survives me being busy with something else.
That sounds like a small administrative detail. It is the difference between a side project and something you can rely on.
Every platform
This was the goal for a long time and it is finally true. Same editor, everywhere you write:
The browser extensions are free. The Apple app, which covers Mac, iPad, iPhone and the Safari extension, is a five dollar one time purchase. No subscription, no account, no upsell in the middle of a sentence.
What it actually does
The core of it is still the boring, useful stuff:
- Live preview with GitHub flavoured rendering, so what you see is what GitHub will render
- Toolbar and keyboard shortcuts (⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘K)
- Version history with automatic snapshots, for when you delete a paragraph you wanted back
- Find and replace
- An outline sidebar for moving around a long document
- Templates and smart paste
- Maths with KaTeX and diagrams with Mermaid
- Word goals with a progress ring, for when you need a nudge
- Exports that look like something: .md, print, themed HTML, or a .zip backup
- Eight themes: Night, Dracula, Coffee, Sunset, Dim, Nord, Cupcake and Synthwave
Version history is the one people write in about. Not because it is clever, but because everybody has lost a paragraph at some point and nobody expects a browser extension to have their back.
The chaos zone
Here is where it stops being a sensible productivity tool.
There is a section of the settings called the chaos zone, and everything in it is optional and off by default. A cat that lives in your editor. Matrix rain. Vaporwave mode. A combo counter. Typewriter sounds. Emoji rain. A words per minute meter. A rage quit alarm. Music mode.
None of that makes you a better writer. That is not what it is for. Writing is mostly a slog, and if a small cat sitting in the corner of your editor gets you through another four hundred words, the cat has earned its place.
This is the part that makes it different, and it is deliberate. There are plenty of markdown editors that are serious. Coffee & Fun is in the name for a reason: the tools should be genuinely good, and they should also be a bit of fun. A progress ring and a rage quit alarm can live in the same settings panel.
Where to find it
Markdown Editor has the download links for every platform. The team is on GitHub and there is a Discord if you want to report something or ask for a feature.
Feature requests genuinely get read. Half the list above started as somebody saying "it would be good if it could…" in that Discord.