The Editors Choice - Critic Markup

Yesterday I updated MultiMarkdown Composer 2 and went through the settings until my eyes stopped at a new tab called “CriticMarkup”.

I suspected that Fletcher added something new to MultiMarkdown. Curiously I activated the feature, left the settings and went on editing my document. It didn’t take long until I wondered what on earth all the additional syntax meant which got applied to my plain text document. I stopped writing and searched the web. Naturally I ended up on this site: CriticMarkup.

Critic Markup is intended to provide basic editorial change tracking in plain text files. The syntax is compatible with Markdown, MultiMarkdown and HTML.

I still don’t know what to say. So here are the hard facts:

It’s a ingenious idea born by Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess in early 2013. The guys realized that there was no way of collaborating on a plain text document without using third-party tools like Google Documents or Etherpad… so they head on to build there on tool.

They achieved to build a readable and easy to grasp syntax which is dead simple to write - everything is truly in the spirit of Markdown.

Here are the 5 ways of adding value to the written words others entrusted to you:

• Addition {++ ++}
• Deletion {-- --}
• Substitution {~~ ~> ~~}
• Comment {>> <<}
• Highlight {== ==}{>> <<}

Head on to the website already and watch the demo videos!

I wish you sweet dreams tonight. Try to imagine a heap of text editors on the web, the Mac and iOS who support the CriticMarkup syntax – I bet your dreams will come through in the next few months. Gabe and Erik made it easy for developers to integrate the syntax.

Originally I wanted to create some TextExpander snippets and Keyboard Maestro macros as an homage to CriticMarkup… but there is nothing left to do for me on that side. The website already offers everything for the user to start right away. They even got a Command Line Preprocessor, how cool is that?