Software Alternatives & Reviews

MacPorts VS MacDown

Compare MacPorts VS MacDown and see what are their differences

MacPorts logo MacPorts

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

MacDown logo MacDown

MacDown is an open source Markdown editor for OS X, released under the MIT License.
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29
  • MacDown Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

MacPorts videos

Linux Tools for your Mac. Package Management. HomeBrew, MacPorts, Fink

More videos:

  • Review - Install and Testing MacPorts on an M1 Mac
  • Review - Installing MacPorts on macOS Catalina

MacDown videos

BARRAS DE CORTE DA MACDOWN | APRESENTANDO MODs | FS19

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MacPorts and MacDown)
Front End Package Manager
Text Editors
0 0%
100% 100
Package Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Markdown Editor
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

MacDown might be a bit more popular than MacPorts. We know about 7 links to it since March 2021 and only 5 links to MacPorts. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

MacPorts mentions (5)

  • Need help with running OpenBSD on VirtualBox
    Brew & macports have libvirt & virt-manager that are used to manage qemu via GUI. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Brew Is a Bad Neighbor
    Or instead of all this, try MacPorts[0], which in my experience has 99% of what you need. The biggest drawbacks are less support from quite niche packages (the ones that sets up its own homebrew tap), and a bit slower updates. But then I found it bearable much more than homebrew’s downsides. [0]: https://macports.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How to prevent WireGuard from starting up (menubar) on MacOS?
    You can install wireguard-go and wireguard-tools (or boringtun, which is Cloudflare's userspace implementation) using either MacPorts or Brew. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Newbie Problem with MacOS Terminal Stuff
    That being said, I'm going to assume that you're working on MacO. Flatpaks aren't going to be an option, that's only going to work if you're using Linux (like Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Mint, and so on). If you need to install HandBrake, you may want to consider using macports.org, or brew.sh, these are projects that provide additional libraries and packages for MacOS, this way you can install additional... Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Top 10 trending github repos of the week🚽.
    On macOS you can also install the latest release with MacPorts:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago

MacDown mentions (7)

  • Epub rendering with Pandoc
    I write a LOT of documentation in Markdown for $DAYJOB. I normally use Marked2 (not free, but I paid for my license 7-8 years ago) or MacDown (free) to preview them, and to export them to PDF. Both of these programs are specific to macOS, but a web search for "markdown editor" turns up a few dozen others, for other platforms. Most of these will have an "export to PDF" function built into them. Source: 5 months ago
  • Good Free Application For Reading `.md` Files On Mac Pro
    MacDown is free, open source and super simple. Has been my go-to Markdown editor for years. Highly recommend. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Is there any beautiful Markdown editor?
    Macdown: https://macdown.uranusjr.com/ And here's a huge list: https://github.com/mundimark/awesome-markdown-editors. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • High probability of conversion issues from PDF to Epub
    So I convert the PDF to Markdown format. Then I use my Markdown editor of choice, Macdown, to clean up the text and then convert the resulting document into the format that I want. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Markdown editor's with a toolbar?
    If you're talking about buttons to help you style your text so you don't have to remember the syntax, then MacDown will have you covered. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing MacPorts and MacDown, you can also consider the following products

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

Typora - A minimal Markdown reading & writing app.

pkgsrc - pkgsrc is a framework for building over 17,000 open source software packages.

Markdown by DaringFireball - Text-to-HTML conversion tool/syntax for web writers, by John Gruber

Homebrew Cask - Install with ease. Your software is just one command away from being ready and raring to go. Forget all about babysitting the install process step by step, from website to cleanup. ls /usr/local/Caskroom google-chrome .

StackEdit - Full-featured, open-source Markdown editor based on PageDown, the Markdown library used by Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites.