Text Editors That Render Markdown Directly

I've written a lot about WriteMonkey, a minimalist, low-distraction editor for Windows. My pages about WriteMonkey are here, here, and here. WriteMonkey is full-featured and the ability to convert Markdown markup to HTML, indeed full web pages, not just snippets, is only one of its features.

Recently, I learned of another Windows editor written specifically to produce web pages from Markdown source files. This is MarkdownPad being developed by Evan Wondrasek. Evan is actively adding new features, but the editor currently lacks search-and-replace or a spell checker.

BTW, the formatting for this page is based on the default style sheet built in to MarkdownPad. That, in turn, is based on Kevin Burke's work. Both editors allow custom CSS style sheets to be applied to a document, but WriteMonkey allows multiple, selectable sheets to be applied at the time of rendering while MarkdownPad allows either the default style or one custom sheet specified through the settings in the program.

I did a comparison of how completely the two editors render the full suite of Markdown markup by running the same source document through each of the converters. You can see the results for WriteMonkey here and for MarkdownPad here.