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TextNut Review – A Full Featured Markdown Editor for Mac

I’ve been looking for a new Markdown editor recently and I have stumbled upon TextNut. It’s a great markdown app with a lot of useful features!

One of the first things I was really looking for was the ability to view all my files. I want to use an app that can replace Evernote, or similar notebook, and I wanted to be able to quickly switch from note to note without having to go back to the Finder. Turns out, finding a good markdown editor with a tree view is pretty hard but TextNut has it.

Another thing I wanted was the ability for the app to open existing documents from a folder in the Finder and not use their own storage solution. I already have a bunch of markdown files in Google Drive and I’d like to keep them there. They are synced with Google’s app and any edits I make should sync right back.

TextNut has all these things and more.

TextNut is a native Mac app so no worries about a web based interface or half baked Electron app. It also has an iOS app if you choose to sync your files through iCloud.

It has a great pop-up toolbar that allows you to quickly add formatting to highlighted text. Keyboard shortcuts are there of course too. You can also enable a  tips sidebar that gives you yet another way to find formatting. They really have you covered when it comes to formatting.

It has tasks! You can create task lists in Markdown and check off items as you get done while still in Markdown view. It’s not a fake checkbox, it actually has three different states. Pretty neat.

TextNut also has word count, character count, Zen mode, typewriter scrolling, line highlighting so you know where your cursor is, tags, filters, themes, and quite a few other pretty nice features.

It’s free to try too! I haven’t run into any limitations on the free version and, from what I understand, it’s not a time based free trial. It’s once you get too many notes that it’ll ask you to buy. By then you’ll probably be in love with the app.

There are a few downsides, but nothing that is a deal breaker for me. The ability to have multiple documents open in tabs would be handy. It has MacOS tabs built in, but a new tab is like a whole new application. For some reason, you can’t just open a document in a new tab. The way files are organized is a little weird too as they show in random order. I’m sure it’s not random, but I have yet to figure out the order. Date created maybe?

Overall, this is a great Markdown editor for the Mac and one of the most feature rich ones I’ve seen. I know there are quite a few choices out there, but I’d highly encourage you to not overlook TextNut.


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