SmartDown Review

SmartDown is a full-featured Markdown text editor with syntax highlighting and HTML previewing, offering export to RTF, HTML, and PDF. Plain Markdown is supported, along with MultiMarkdown for things like tables, and Critic Markup for tracking changes. Light/dark themes are available, as well as your own; every aspect of syntax highlighting is customizable, and you can add your own CSS for Markdown preview.

Writers are well served, with statistics on words, sentences, pages, and reading time; you can even specify a word-count goal, and SmartDown will show your progress. It takes Markdown syntax into account when counting words, and it offers a Highlight Mode, where all but the current sentence or paragraph is dimmed. You can also do basic outlining in your Markdown file. Headings can be collapsed/expanded, using arrows in the document gutter, and there’s a floating tooltip marking the section. You can even export your work as an OPML file.

There are some handy editing tools, like shortcuts to move lines and a right-click palette of Markdown-insertion options. 

The bottom line. SmartDown is ideal for planning, organizing and writing documents in Markdown. Extensive customization options add to the appeal.