Writing Posts with Markdown

For a little while, I was looking for a desktop blogging client to accompany WordPress. I was particularly wary of the WP WYSIWYG editor, with its non-deterministic written text -> HTML conversion, and I was also wondering whether desktop editors had better keyboard shortcut support.
Turns out, this is a case where active development of the webapp completely trumps native apps. Beyond having to pay for a desktop client, being on the WP admin site means I’m actually taking full advantage of the plugins and panels I’ve installed, from SEO to custom fields to post previews. An extra <p> tag or two is worth the added functionality.
That said, though, I’ve found the markup language Markdown was designed for my needs; it has a wiki-like syntax (which kind of counts as a keyboard shortcut, or at least non-forced-GUI), provisions for literal and code fragments, and has pretty wide support. I’m trying to write my posts now in Markdown with the well-designed Markdown QuickTags plugin; we’ll see how well it goes after a few epic writing sessions.