Why It’s a Big Deal
MMD Composer is a big deal because it’s the first time the creator of Markdown (or a variant of Markdown) has created a text editor. It’s not a massive text editor like BBEdit or TextMate, but for me that’s fine. I don’t use more than a sliver of either applications’ power. I just want a straightforward text editor that handles MultiMarkdown really well. MMD Composer, created by Fletcher Penny, is just that. A lot of text editors on the market don’t do a great job with MultiMarkdown. They handle Markdown just fine, but a lot of them don’t do MultiMarkdown at all. Seeing as Fletcher Penny is the creator of MMD, Composer does the best job of MMD formatting I’ve ever seen.
So What’s New?
MMD’s best addition to the basic Markdown syntax is the ability to create tables. The biggest thing in MMD Composer for me is the automatic wrapping of tables.
It can take text like:
| Name | Phone Number |
| —— | ————– | Louise | 555-1234 Benny | 555-1285 Alex | 555-8320 [Contact Details]
And turn it into this:
It’s pretty nifty, right? It also adds more options for images like size customization and creating footnotes.
MMD Composer can auto-pair characters like [], (), and “”. Makes creating links and the like much easier. Another cool trick for links is that if you’ve got a URL in the clipboard, you can highlight a string of text in MMD Composer, paste the clipboard contents and MMD Composer will automatically create a link for you. Also, highlight text and use the usual RTF ⌘ + B or ⌘ + I and it wraps the text in asterisks for you. It’s quite handy. MMD Composer exports as RTF, LaTeX, HTML, OPML and you can even give it a custom shell script for custom exporting. There’s also a nice Table of Contents function so that you can open a ToC drawer and jump quickly between different # headers. Lastly, if you have Brett Terpstra’s Marked installed, you can have MMD Composer open up Marked when previewing documents.
If you write in MultiMarkdown on a Mac, you should definitely be using MultiMarkdown Composer. It’s currently available at an introductory price of $7.99.