The Markdown Link no. 28

An occasional post from The Markdown Handbook.

Among today’s links are markdown editors Plain Text Editor and Clearly, plus Herbert, a writing environment for long-form content. We also cover Blank, an open source blog app, and Quik, which allows you to speak your notes and export them as markdown.

• Plain Text Editor is a simple scratchpad. While it won’t handle your largest tome, it’s useful to have around for those quick notes you later rely on in court! Available, at the moment, from the App Store for free for Macs running OSes 13, 14 and 15; it costs $5 (or its App Store-equivalent conversion of £5) for macOS 16 (Tahoe) and later.
• There is a lot to like about Clearly – it’s free and open source for a start, but there are also a number of small issues that need attention. A quick look suggests the following: limited font choice (maybe could open it up to the system); no line-height adjustment; narrow, medium, wide for readable line length would be better if the user had a way of adjusting the width in pixels (an issue I have with many markdown editors); export as PDF only; and, there’s no obvious way to set up a workspace. In case you’re wondering, it’s ⌘-O and choose a folder. I would prefer if it could be done through the settings or even, as I have found with some editors, by giving workspaces their own place on the menu bar and leave ⌘-O for opening files. There is the option to copy to html, plain text, rich text and markdown, but, again, I’d prefer if these were permitted as ‘export’ or ‘save as’ options. Available for macOS 15 or later.
• Herbertapp says it is a purpose-built writing environment for long-form content, such as books, screenplays and theses. It claims that it’s like “Scrivener without the chaos”, and I can quite believe that having experienced Scrivener long ago – corkboards and all. It has an outliner, metadata, search, a minimalist writing environment and syncs via iCloud. There’s currently no access to settings, so font choice is limited. Export is to .md, .pdf and .docx. The developer says it is only available for macOS at the moment. Herbert is free to download while it remains in beta.
• Blank is a simple, open-source blog application, built with the SvelteKit framework. Aside from the deployment configuration, the application is customised via static configuration, local and theming files.
• Quik.md allows you to speak your notes; it takes care of the recording and writing. There is a free tier but the costs start to add up when you go pro. Quik allows you to export your notes to plain text or markdown when you want them to travel. It costs $14.99 per month or $69.99 per year. $99 gets you a lifetime licence.

The ‘big print’

I am not a developer. Therefore, I am not the developer of any of the apps mentioned above or elsewhere on this site. Nor am I earning a commission from any of the apps mentioned above or on this site. I am cash poor, time poor and simply trying to share some great, as well as – some might feel – not-so-great apps.