I recommend Typora [1] as an alternative writer. It's a WYSIWYG Markdown editor available on Win/Linux/macOS with the focus mode and other nice features.

It has themes [2] too and you can easily create yours to match your blog design. That way, as you write, you have a live preview of your article.

[1]: https://typora.io

[2]: https://theme.typora.io

I second this. I've been using Typora for some 2 years now and I'm extremely happy with it.

It's currently free but the developer intends to charge for it once it's out of Beta.

I highly recommend Zettlr [1]. I used it exclusively for writing my Masters thesis and it won me over. Pandoc and Zotero integrations make the whole process incredibly smooth, but still leave you with a clean, minimalist editor and interface.

That being said, great work by OP. I used to love writing with Notepad, but massive numbers of documents demand organization and digging into external folders just doesn't always cut it, and sometimes I really can use a bit more versatility. I've tried a number of different solutions over the years, the best of which was a customized setup of Atom, but it was still clunky. If I hadn't already found Zettlr, I'd have loved to give OP's beautiful setup a shot. I still might just for fun.

[1] https://www.zettlr.com

Edit: Adding that Zettlr is free and open source and actively developed/maintained.

I just wished tools that use Markdown for note taking also support tables. Preferable visually. Somehow it appears to be difficult to implement for AppKit/macOS?

I recommend Zettlr in a top-level comment. It is able to handle tables within its Markdown setup. Here's how it handles them: https://docs.zettlr.com/en/core/tables/

Obsidian, which uses markdown, supports tables and has several community plugins available that make manipulating tables much easier. http://obsidian.md

org-mode

Why would you write prose in a monospaced font?

Mainly because people who use plain text editors come to love the editor and don't want to leave it when they write prose.

But that editor is likely configured for monospace fonts, and it's easier not to change it.

It’s in the article; sublime text doesn’t support bold or italic formatting of variable spaced fonts, and the author wants formatting so they’re stuck with monospaced until support is added.