Joel Spolsky (who started his career at Microsoft as a manager on the Excel team) has been writing some recent longer blog posts on a MacBook Pro in TextMate using Markdown. He describes the process in a recent entry. He calls it a “surprisingly good experience.”
He goes on to gripe about anti-aliasing quality (FWIW, that’s explained here), and beachballing from dropped wifi connections (which I’ve never experienced, maybe it’s an early Intel thing?).
Can’t stop tweaking the blog engine. Added:
.txt to any individual post URL to see the Markdown source, like this (mostly added for the benefit of people curious about Markdown)TextMate author Allan Odgaard has been working on a user manual for the program, in preparation for next week’s final release of version 1.1. He’s been writing and editing for a few weeks. As a Markdown devotee (all my posts here are written using Markdown) I was pleased to see this comment in his blog entry about the manual:
Should you somehow have missed my countless references to Markdown then for the records let me just state that the documentation was written in Markdown and I absolutely love it!
When I was starting this site and designing the software that powers it I decided that I didn’t want to use raw HTML for writing posts. After 10 years of authoring HTML I still find it visually obtrusive, and somewhat distracting when trying to focus on writing. I considered both Textile and RST but ultimately settled on Markdown. The implementation I use is Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown, which has worked flawlessly.
I find that, as advertised, Markdown is great for writing text (and hypertext). The source is very readable – which makes the writing process a lot easier, especially for longer posts – and I almost never need to write straight HTML.