Discovering Mou

One of the reasons that I feel that I can actually make good headway with this blog (as opposed to other attempts that I’ve made writing in this medium) is that I’m using markdown which enables a writer to compose a piece without having to worry about formatting up front. The markdown notation however requires actually formatting characters to be inserted into text - it’s just that a plain text file marked down with markdown is a lot easier to read that an html formatted file.

Go here more information on markdown. I suppose the other extreme to writing a blog post in markdown or even direct html would be creating and formatting in a program like MS Word. And of course this brings up the initial issue of separating composition from formatting, but also involves all of the other concerns of using a general Word Processor for writing a simple blog post. It’s kind of like using a sledge hammer to kill ants and besides not everyonene necessarily has a copy of Word. I don’t have Microsoft Word by the way, and for that reason alone, I suppose, it’s a non starter for my blogging tool.

All of the above is kind of a prelude to my happy discovery of a new markdown editor for the Mac called Mou. It’s available on the developer’s website at Mou and even though it’s still only in “early ”beta stage" according to the developer “ it seems to be (as far as I’m concerned) quite feature complete as a markdown writing tool.

Mou has a straight forward window divided down the center with a left hand side frame for text entry as formated markdown and a right hand side frame devoted to html ‘live preview’ display. There’s also an option for css choice on the live preview and it all works extremely well and seemlessly.

One of the reasons that I like this program and am using it in the production of this blog is that the live preview makes it very easy to learn markdown by example - there’s a very useful example file provided - but none of this would be so useful if the program was slow. Indeed tardyness if definitely not a problem here, and I’m running Mou presently on a 4 GB iMac on 2008 vintage as well as a recent model MacBook Pro with 8 MB of RAM. I switch back and forth between devices with my production file residing on a dropbox folder.

Once I’m satisfied with the formatting and general appearance of the text, etc, it’s a simple matter to just copy text from Mou directly into html which can be pasted into MarsEdit for final preview, etc and posting to the blog. I have to admit that I’ve done some experimentation with this, but at least for the time being this all seems to work pretty smoothly.

And that’s all there really is to know at this stage, although I have to say that for this last part of this entry I’m actually using Byword in conjuction with Mou since I like Byword’s typewriter style scrolling facility and larger font size.