Typora

It’s not new. I’m just late to the party.

I love plain text files for documents. They’re future-proof, past-proof, and completely platform agnostic. I’m sure someone has written a text editor in Minecraft or something more outrageous. Text editor for Gameboy Colour? Text editor for a Casio F91W.

But sometimes text files need a little more oomph. Some va-va-voom. And this is where Markdown comes along. It’s still a plain text file, but you can format the text with some markup that ranges from very simple, to slightly less simple.

Like this:

# Heading 1
## Heading 2 - The headening
This is the body text.

1. This is
2. an ordered
3. list

and

- this is
- an unordered
- list

and 

- [ ] these
- [ ] are
- [x] checkboxes

This then ends up looking like this:

when viewed through an interpreter. The themes can be tweaked, but you can tweak individual bits of the style. You can’t suddenly decide that your ordered lists part way through should be twice the size or something.

And it just works. The files don’t bloat. There is image support. Table support. All manner of things.

And because it’s plain text files, it works perfectly with your preferred version control system (git, most likely, right?) in a way that Word Documents don’t.

I recently stumbled upon Typora and it’s just bloody great. You can either type in code, or use the wysiwyg interface, or kinda use both at the same time where the styles update as you type in the code. It’s not free, but why should it be? It’s very well priced at AU$22. It’ll probably never stop working – and if it does, there are dozens of other text editors out there that will pick up your file and open it without any issues.

Start writing in Markdown. You’ll like it. I think.