Search for the Holy Grail of Editors ends (almost)

I've been looking a long time for a Holy Grail Editor for Drupal. I never liked the really popular options such as TinyMCE. I'll pick on TinyMCE because it's what I've tried the most, but it is representative of many of the wysiwyg editors (what you see is what you get). TinyMCE is one offender of wysiwyg: it is too complex; encourages bad markup; doesn't have line breaks; and when one looks at the html it's all squished together. The fact is, wysiwyg is enticing and can be quite useful, but one gives up control over the look and the preciseness of the layout. That's why I'm not the only one who was looking for a good compromise: wysiwyg but still simple and expressive of the underlining markup.

So I've been trying out BUEditor mashed with Markdown via the Markdown Editor for BUEditor plugin. There were things I loved about each of them separately, and privately yearned for a way to use both together. Since I'm comfortable with HTML I liked that I could markup documents with BUEditor without being burdened with the overhead and messiness of TinyMCE. The big drawback of BUEditor is that it still forces new users to look at HTML, which can be confusing to read with all the tags.

That's where Markdown comes in. It's a simple text way to give a visual representation of markup without the mess. It shows more than HTML and it's clean.

Now there's the simple plugin that defines some javascript and buttons for BUEditor so you can now use Markdown without having to refer to the manual all the time. It works like a dream -- well most of the time. There's always a catch. For instance, I sometimes have problems with it recognizing a properly formed link. This turns out not to be a problem with markdown but with the way my particular website is configured - I haven't had it shown up elsewhere. It is easily fixed all the same by just using markdown links in a different manner.

Update: It was a simple problem: if Image Assist filters the text before Markdown gets a chance then it will stop markdown from correctly interpreting the last link. I'm not sure why only the last one, but if you go to Input Filters, edit your filter and move Markup higher in the weights than Image Assist then it should work fine.