Some here may remember that some years ago I tried to install MultiMarkDown and Pandoc on the Mac I was using at the time, but didn’t succeed… I couldn’t find the installations!
Anyway, I’ve come back to installing MMD for starters. I have discovered MarkMyWords, which is more convenient for previewing and editing MD or HTML output from Scrivener than a combination of Marked2 and BBEdit. It requires an installation of MMD to work with .mmd files.
So, I downloaded the MultiMarkDown-Mac-6.70 installer, ran it, then spent a time trying to find the /usr/local/bin/ folder, I was told to locate; Spotlight wouldn’t find it! Eventually, I found it inside a “MultiMarkDown-Mac-6.70” folder on my desktop. Downloads come onto my desktop to make them easier to deal with but I was looking for this arcane path that I thought should be somewhere in something like Application Support.
To cut a long story short, for the moment I have moved the “MultiMarkDown-Mac-6.70” folder into the downloads folder. But my question is, do any of you gurus have a suggestion as to the optimum place to put it? I am wondering about putting it directly in my home folder; is that a good idea?
Thanks, but (a) I have already got it installed; (b) to do it again that way, I’d have to start by installing HomeBrew; (c) that still doesn’t tell me where it would be located. If I knew that, I could just move it all to that location anyway.
Finding /usr/local/bin/ was what stumped me last time.
So, this is solved now? (Just in case, cause I’m not sure how to interpret your reply: It’s literally located in /usr/local/bin/. /usr is a hidden folder in the root directory of “Macintosh HD”.)
You definitely want the multimarkdown executable in /usr/local/bin, as that is in the PATH by default, and it is where programs like Scrivener will be looking for it most likely. You can think of it as kind of the /Applications folder of the normal *NIX world. It’s a place for installing your own tools in an area that the system isn’t going to trample on in OS updates.
You can also use the open command from Terminal on folders by the way, including the . shorthand for the current directory. So if you are in a location like that in Terminal and want to see it in Finder, you can type open .
I’m a little surprised the installer didn’t do that for you, and instead unloaded everything into your Desktop. That’s a bit awkward, but maybe newer versions of macOS don’t allow installers to install *NIX utilities? Wouldn’t shock me! I haven’t tried .pkg installs in years. I use homebrew for everything, even Scrivener.
Just tried the installer (6.70) from Releases · fletcher/MultiMarkdown-6 · GitHub and it installs /usr/local/bin/multimarkdown. So it’s not a problem of macOS (13.5.1) or the installer.
Add: I suspect the OP downloaded the .zip file (instead of the .pgk installer!). It contains the /usr/… directory structure and would require a manual moving to the appropriate location.
I downloaded the .pkg again and ran it. This time there is no new folder on my desktop. It said the installation had been successful, but where is the /usr/local/bin/ folder in the SSID? What is the PATH? If I open a Terminal window, what do I enter to find it?
By the way, double clicking the .pkg comes up with the “can’t open because of unknown developer” alert; I had to right click, open with installer app and then click to confirm that I want to install it.
Thanks, that all checks out, and ‘ls’ shows me all the files in the folder that should be there. As to where it all is in SSID terms, i.e. what precedes the /usr/, I’ll just forget about for the moment.
The /usr is at the same level as /Library or /Applications, you just can’t see it in Finder without adjusting a hidden preference that shows all hidden files. Everything descends from / (root), even other disks you plug into the system (which typically go into /Volumes/ on a Mac, but can be instructed to mount to other areas of the tree).
Thank you both. That is the information I was looking for.
Basically, I’ve been a Mac user since 1991 (if I remember rightly: before that, I had one of the original “Jackintosh” Atari 520s with the external floppy drive and a “whopping” 512KB Ram!) so I have known my way around the various Mac operating systems since System 8. But since MacOSX 1 was launched, I’ve just accepted the Unix underpinnings but not explored them.
I’m not a computer scientist and have never done any programming, so I had no need. Around 1985, until I bought my Atari, I was using a PC as a terminal on the university’s Unix network, doing my writing in very basic LaTex. When I got my Atari, I installed emacs and wrote my LaTex at home, having discovered that there was a Macintosh SE available for staff use, and found a way (I don’t remember how I did it, except that the two could read the same 3.5" floppy) of getting the output onto the Mac to print out using its (£6000!) laser printer. So 1986/7 is when I last interacted directly with Unix.
Anyway, if I move on to further investigating Pandoc/Quarto, I know where to look if I need.
Just FYI, one of the advantages of MarkMyWords, for me at least, is that it has a three-pane system, with a Navigator sidebar, the code-editing pane, and a preview pane showing any changes in the editor in real-time. Also, again from my needs, its RTF output seems much better out of the box than Marked2’s.
Just in case you ever get bored and wonder what hides beyond “root”, you’ll discover (e.g. with macOS’s Disc Utility) a Matryoshka of snapshots inside of volumes inside of volume groups inside of containers sitting on the iron. The good news is that you don’t need to know any of that.
It’s the same layout in iA Writer, Obsidian and probably two dozen other Markdown editors. But it seems the trend is heading in the direction of “live preview”. Which is kind of funny, because in a way that imitates working with RTF.
I have iA writer on my iPad, but I was sorely put off by the £50 price-tag for the Mac version (£15 for MarkMyWords). As for Obsidian, I have it, but for some reason it’s never clicked with me.
Basically, for the moment, I manage a (pretty large) website†, and some while back started creating the text for articles in a Scrivener project which compiles to headless HTML (thank, you Ioa). I was setting it to compile to Marked 2, which was fine, but when I spotted something wrong, I either needed to go back to the project, make changes and recompile, or open the HTML in BBEdit, make the changes and save for Marked 2 to pick them up.
By compiling to MarkMyWords (it’s not solely an MD/MMD editor), I can make changes in the editing pane and see the results immediately. So, when I’ve got it exactly how I want it, (a) I can go back to the Scrivener project knowing exactly what needs to be done to that as an archive, and (b) copy and paste the HTML into the appropriate place in the website editor.
I spend much of my other time with RTF, as that is the native format of NWP as well as Scrivener. Thank heavens one doesn’t have to work with that at the code level!
Mark
† It’s Joomla CMS—I know little about the programming side of it, that was done for us, but I’ve got setting up new content down to a T. I wrote a manual in the hope that my wife would be able to help… it ran to about 25 pages but she found it too daunting!
Yeah, it’s now unfortunately one of those apps that start to feel like an unconditional basic income for its devs. There are still updates coming in homoeopathic doses, but it appears by and large they have lost interest in their main product. Still no feature parity across platforms (which is surprising considering so few features), and the prices seem to increase inversely proportional to the speed of development. With only a few organizational additions, they could have snatched a big chunk of Ulysses’ market share when that went subscription, but never bothered. Probably because enough people still pay $50 for a text editor.
I think the default in Obsidian might even be live editor preview now? Or maybe it’s a start-up question now on a new install, I seem to recall an A/B question during an update some time ago. It’s a core plugin you can enable at any rate (edit: actually, an editor setting that’s always there, not a plugin).
I’ve always found the trend amusing as well, but I guess it goes to demonstrate how such an incredibly complicated system like word processing ended up ever getting popular in the first place over simpler writing methods: it looks nicer. And that’s about it.
People do mind that, but at the same time, there is something that Markdown does as a writing method that is appealing to many, and that is how it isn’t a pile of ridiculously complicated controls crowding everywhere into the creative writing environment. It’s as simple as using a typewriter; it’s forced to be that way, you can’t even be tempted to mess with the kerning over your best intentions, because there is no way to. That concept itself does not compete with making things look nicer (subjectively) in the writing area. Combine the popular appeal of what made Word beat WordPerfect with something so simple to write with, and it’s a pretty good formula!
I don’t think it is a coincidence that 99% of Markdown-orienting writing tools out there are dirt simple: it’s because that’s why most people choose to use it as a writing tool. There really is very little out there that uses Markdown in a “power user” capacity at the GUI-based writing tool level, like Scrivener does. But that’s the impression you get of it around here, probably because we’re one of the few games in town that treats Markdown like something that can do more, at the document production level, than working with a tool like Word, rather than as a Zen tool.
So while I do not use live editor preview, and personally do not like that approach, I do like how there is the choice now, and how it definitely does bring back the DOS word processing days @rms speaks of, of having a bimodal interface between an abstract representation of formatting (not even remotely WYSIWYG) and a view that shows your formatting codes in detail if you need it. For me, a two-screen preview is fine enough, and I often turn that off as well, only turning it on to proof a draft.
In general, I am leaning more and more towards separating the writing process from the way it will look “on the page”. Indeed, even though I use rich text for most of my projects which I compile to RTF, I actually use it more as a mark-up system. I have a standard compile format and use a macro in NWP which applies the necessary details of styles, etc.
So for this project, in essence, I am using the app to proofread what has been drafted and compiled from Scrivener, but with the option to deal with any issues by editing the HTML (as at the moment) directly within the same app. I don’t have a to-and-fro between it and another app like I did with Marked 2 and BBEdit. The preview gives me a view very close to what it’s going to look like on the website, and I can copy the HTML directly from the editor without having to open the file in BBEdit first.
MarkMyWords has workspace options where you can turn off the sidebar, and either the editor or the previewer, or use any combination (though I don’t think you can have only the sidebar!), that suits you. So you can have a bare editor, with the previewer a shortcut away if you want.
R Studio also has a Quarto extension that provides a live preview, but it would probably be overkill if you don’t need the R side. There is also a Quarto extension for VSCode that is worth checking out if you can tolerate VSCode.
To be sure, do you know that you can set up BBEdit to work with MMD? It is very simple and the manual describes it. I couldn’t understand if you were already doing that or something else using BBEdit.
My comment about Pandoc/Quarto is simply that I tried and failed to get Pandoc working some years ago. I am attracted to them for aesthetic reasons, but I don’t need to go that route for anything I’m doing at the moment. If I was much younger, I would take the time to work it all out because I find the concept attractive, but at 78, there are other things that are more important. I know nothing about R or VSCode… it is matters like that which would make using Quarto a very time-consuming labour.
As for BBEdit, yes, I have been using it with MMD and with HTML. My shift away is simply to have the HTML code I’m concerned with and a preview of it within the same app, just like my use of two editors in Scrivener for translations, one with the source text, the other with the target text. BBEdit lets me work with the code, but doesn’t do the preview.
But it seems the trend is heading in the direction of “live preview”. Which is kind of funny, because in a way that imitates working with RTF.