I find other people’s workflows to be fascinating. It’s not because I necessarily want to do what they do, we all do things differently, after all, but because there might be a step in their process that would help me in mine.

Because I have read so many workflow stories, I thought I’d publish mine, in case others like to read them too.

The short version is that I start in Ulysses, move to Atom, switch over to PhpStorm (with a side trip to Tower), and it all ends up on my server at Site5.

It seems to me as if developers are just naturally curious about other developers’ toolsets and workflows. I’m like that. And photographers seem to be that way, too. Maybe we all just want to be sure we’re not missing out on anything.

So I’ll write up mine. Not because I have a toolset or workflow demanding to be copied, but just to tell people what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll have one thing that fits in your workflow. Or maybe you’ll have a tip for me in the comments.

Because Grav is the CMS behind this blog, I’m always looking for tools that work well with it. Grav’s Admin plug-in has a more-than-passable plain-text editor and my web IDE, PhpStorm, has a not-so-good Markdown editor. So, if I wanted a first-class Markdown writing experience, what would be the “best” Mac tool for the job?

It turns out that there are a whole bunch of Markdown editing apps for the Mac, many with iOS versions as well. They share a number of features in common, most notably live previews of the rendered HTML. But Typora has a little something extra — it shows Markdown as WYSIWIG.

So many programmers’ text editors… I know; a first-class problem. But still, I waste too much time jumping from one to the other looking for the “best” text editor for me.

First it’s good old TextMate and then it’s high-powered Sublime Text; but what about the up-and-coming Atom? And aren’t the “real” IDEs such as Coda and PhpStorm the true answer for the developer?