Composing in TextMate with MarkDown

Normally I use CityDesk to compose things for Joel on Software, but the long articles on recruiting were written from home where I have a MacBook Pro (CityDesk is Windows only).

I was trying to find appropriate software that I could use to compose long articles that felt smooth on a Mac, that generated extremely clean HTML, and that generated curly quotes (“”) which I've grown fond of, especially for longer articles.

The combination I found that made me happiest was TextMate in Markdown mode. It was a surprisingly good experience. TextMate is an "emacs inspired" editor for the Mac, with tons of build-in stuff for editing different types of text files that they call Bundles. Markdown is a very simple way to format text, for example, putting *asterisks* around text that you want italicized; it generates nice clean HTML. Even Markdown  source is quite clean and still highly readable, useful if you need to post the same content to Usenet or use it in plain text somewhere.

I have a few complaints though:

OS X antialiasing, especially, it seems, with the monospaced fonts, just isn't as good as Windows ClearType. Apple has some room to improve in this area; the fonts were blurry on the edges.

Also, I don't understand all these people who say that Macs never crash. I probably had to reboot the MacBook Pro (hard reboot -- hold down the power button for five seconds) about every two hours. It was always the same problem: the Wifi network would go down for a second, something which happens to everyone, but on Windows, it just comes back, while on the Mac, I get a spinning colored ball and everything is frozen. Everything. Forever. If I try to wait it out the beachball will still be spinning the next morning. If anybody is aware of this problem and knows of a specific fix I'd love to hear of it. It was like a Windows 3.1 deja vu all over again thing.

I still have to say that composing large amounts of text with Word 2007 on Windows XP is a better experience, all told, because of the autocorrection and the better screen display.

One more note -- all the pictures I've published in the last few days are of the Fog Creek office, of course, taken recently by photographer Gregg Conde.

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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