One problem I did experience when working with markdown and github was to preview the markdown, I just produced. I must admit that I’m not too comfortable with markdown syntax. So I fail often at first (and even second and later) edit. Without being able to preview the markdown loacally, this quickly leads to lots of commits, just dealing with minor (and even still faulty) updates e.g. on the README.md file. But there are some different approaches to deal with this. A good list of alternatives is on the homepage of the Livedown editor plugin. Go for the “Alternatives” chapter.

I did decide to use Grip for the following reasons:

  • editor independent, because being a standalone application, in contrast editor plugins,
  • supporting relative URLs (this means that following links in the hirarchy should work)

So install by

$ pip install grip

Unfortunately there is no Ubuntu/Debian package afaik, so staying up to date is a pain (see here and here ).

Run by

$ cd myrepo
$ grip myfile.md
 * Running on http://localhost:6419/

There are lots of other options, so visit Grip Homepage for mor information.