Markdown has become the de facto standard for lightweight formatting markup, and understandably so. Its simplified syntax is easy to master, and the markup itself is human-readable and straightforward in use. Markdown's versatility also means that you can use it for a wide range of tasks: from note-taking and technical documentation, to creating ebooks and maintaining blogs. No wonder more and more services and applications are embracing Markdown as their default formatting system.

Markdown Editors

Almost every decent text editor these days provides at least partial support for Markdown. For example, Gedit, Kate, Atom, and many others can handle Markdown syntax highlighting, so you can use any of them to edit Markdown-formatted text files. If you are looking for a dedicated Markdown editor, however, you do have a few options at your disposal.

ReText [1] is a simple yet versatile text editor that supports Markdown and can export Markdown-formatted text files to the ODF, PDF, and HTML formats. ReText features HTML syntax highlighting, autosave, live preview, and spell check (Figure 1). The editor sports a tabbed interface, so you can manage multiple text files, and the Preview pane lets you view the formatted output of the currently edited file. The Tags and Symbols drop-down lists let you quickly insert often-used HTML tags and symbols.

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