Markdown Editor

EmEditor features the Markdown Design View, which offers a near-WYSIWYG experience.

Introduced a Markdown design view that offers a near-WYSIWYG experience for editing Markdown files.

Markdown, introduced by John Gruber, is widely used across various platforms due to its simple text formatting capabilities for paragraphs, links, and images. Documents in Markdown are easily readable even in basic text editors like Notepad, making it popular for blogs, StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and academic papers. Recently, it’s also been used in AI-generated responses. The enhanced Markdown support aims to improve the display of AI prompt responses, a feature introduced in the previous version (v24.3).

A Markdown Design View button has been added to the main toolbar, allowing you to toggle the Design View on or off. When you select the Markdown configuration, opening associated files will automatically enable the Design View. This view is also applied to documents created using the AI prompt feature. You can adjust these settings on the new Markdown page in the Customize dialog.

Switching to the Design View displays the Markdown toolbar. By clicking the Markdown Preview button, you can view a preview of the Markdown using the WebPreview plugin.

Here are some key differences between Markdown Preview and Design View:

Given these differences, it’s advisable not to rely solely on EmEditor’s Design View. Instead, check your work in Preview or an external web browser during editing.

You can change block styles using the dropdown menu on the Markdown toolbar, like Paragraph, Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. You can also format text with buttons like Bold, Italic, Code, etc. These buttons behave differently depending on whether text is selected or already formatted. For example, clicking Bold without selecting text will bold the entire word at the cursor. If the text at the cursor is already formatted differently, only that text will be bolded. Clicking Bold with text selected toggles the bold formatting. Other buttons allow you to create/insert links, images, tables, horizontal lines, line breaks, numbered lists, bullet lists, etc. These commands are also accessible from the Markdown submenu of the Edit menu, with Ctrl+B as the shortcut for Bold.