Are there text editors that can be used to create markup languages (like markdown, rest and such?)

I'm becoming more interested in markdown and rest for documentation/requisites in projects, but some people in the team aren't that techie to use and remember these markups. It's going to be a bad move to just adopt them when they're used to OpenOffice files.

There is a visual editor for Latex, named Lyx, that is WYSIWYM and WYSIWYG, but I think Latex syntax is too complicated for this task (although the Lyx editor idea is exactly what I'm looking for).

But if there's a good looking editor for markdown/rest that they could use, this approach would be a good idea, using rest/markdown for documentation instead of *.odt files which is what we use by now. That way, I can commit, diff and do a lot of stuff with this documents, convert them to pdf, html and a bunch of different formats. They are just plain text files. Lyx does this to Latex, I'm interested in one that can do the same but for markdown/rest.

Anyone know if there are text editors that can accomplish this? I'm interested in Linux desktop variants.

If anyone have some experiences doing this move with non-techie people, please share your experiences.

Thanks!

(I know there are some solutions like wmd, but for web. What about a gnome desktop alternative?)

PS: I would like that these editors would just save .markdown files, and not a strange intermediary format.

Solution

A detailed description of the following apps will cause this post to become very lengthy. So I will use the following codes to denote some common features:

G: GitHub Flavoured Markdown
M: Mathematical formual syntax support
L: Live Preview
C: Syntax highlighting for code
E: Export to various formats
S: Custom Styling i.e custom css for html etc.
P: Support for plugins
F: Free
D: Active development