Silky Markdown editing on Mac

If you write in Markdown on a Mac you'll no doubt have dabbled with TextMate at some point. If you did, perhaps you discovered some of TextMate's marvellous Markdown mode commands, such as "Google for the highlighted text, and convert it to a link to the first search result" (if memory serves, it was Cmd-Alt-Ctrl-L)?

Editor support like that makes writing in Markdown very productive, but these days I tend to pen my blog posts in simpler editors. Luckily, with Markdown Service Tools you can now setup similar keybindings that work in any app built on top of Cocoa (which is pretty much all of them).

It's pretty easy to do.

Step 1 - install Markdown Service Tools

Grab the zip file and uncompress it into your ~/Library/Services folder (you may need to create it).

Step 2 - setup a keybinding

Open System Preferences and head to the keyboard shortcuts pane. You should find a bunch of services with names that start with "md" (you may also have to wait a minute or so while your Mac reindexes your services before opening the preferences pain or they won't show up).

Setup a key binding, and off you go...