Markdown & Humane Text Service

It seems that I've been missing out doing clever stuff with my Mac. Most recently I've been reading 43 Folders, a site dedicated to "Getting Things Done", but largely, for me, a great resource of tips and tricks for "productivity toys" on the Mac.

Most recently, I've been introduced to:

• Markdown
• Humanetext Service

Now, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. At first. Mostly because I couldn't actually get the damn thing to work.

In order to get it to work, I followed the instructions for Humane Text Service, then:

• went to ~/Library/Services/HumaneText.service/Contents/Resources
• rm forward
• ln -s Markdown.pl forward

And, suddenly, everything worked.

The beauty of it all is that you can write plain English (with a few syntax quirks), and the whole thing is completely readable. In fact, this blog entry is being written in Markdown format and is totally readable. At least, as readable as anything else I write!

The beauty of it is that it plugs into any Mac app that supports services, so I can type away in Markdown inside a textarea in Safari or Firefox, then hit convert text->html ( Cmd-{ ), and voila, I have nicely formatted HTML. Now, for most applications, I don't really need it, but it does mean that I can easily write documents in plain english for any media...