Writing Markdown with Atom

When I first began writing posts on this blog, I simply created a new Markdown file in my 'posts' folder and began writing. Pretty soon I realized that this was beyond inconvenient. I could not save my post in the progress of writing it(which meant I had to be very much prepared before writing), and switching back and forth from the preview tab was also time consuming.

Atom

While contemplating a different solution I realized that Atom was pretty likely to be a good answer. I had often used Atom to write code, and it did support Markdown. After a minute of Googling I discovered the Atom plugin markdown-preview-enhanced, which proved to be a wonderful asset to writing in Markdown.

markdown-preview-enhanced

To install a package in atom, navigate to 'File'-'Settings' and move to the 'Install' tab. Search for the desired package and click 'install'. Then return to your Markdown file and press ctrl+shift+m(an alternative is clicking on 'Packages'-'Markdown Preview'-'Toggle Preview' on the menu bar). Then you have a real-time preview page on the right.

Figure 1. A preview page generated by markdown-preview-enhanced

markdown-preview-enhanced has several advantages to the default Markdown preview Atom provides. For me the greatest merit was that it rendered math in MathJax. Another convenient function is the Image Helper. Navigate to the command palette with ctrl+shift+p and type 'image helper'. Simply drag your local image to the 'Upload' box and the Image Helper generates a url. This makes the tedious process of inserting images in Markdown a lot easier. Some other features of markdown-preview-enhanced include synchronized scrolling between your markdown file and the preview, running code chunks, and TOC(Table of Contents) generation.

For more information about markdown-preview-enhanced you might want to visit this page.