Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

caret.io

59 pointserusev57 comments

I tried the application, and it looks great!

One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don't is wordcount. In Caret, the document wordcount is always visible in the upper right corner, and if I select some text, the wordcount for the selection is displayed again. Others have mentioned the lack of live-preview as a deal-breaker, but I'm ok with this because of the easy, obvious shortcut. My main purpose with Markdown editors is writing READMEs and blog posts, and I usually don't keep live-preview open as I'm writing.

The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.

Why is so important for you the wordcount feature? I don't get it.

I'm with antback on this one. You write as many words as are needed to convey your message. Unless you are a journalist or a student, why does it matter?

Also, if you're serious about word count and other metadata about your document then you should look into Marked 2. It's got that and much more.

Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time.

The lack of good desktop Markdown editors used to haunt me, until I started building one my own and realized how poor the support for Markdown in C++ was.

> Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview

Atom has this with the "Markdown Preview" that pops-up with SHIFT + CTRL + M. It does most of what I want today, but still feels lacking.

I've also been using Mou for a good while that gives you a live preview as you edit: http://25.io/mou/

I used Mou, VIM and MacDown in the past. Vim of course doesn't have a preview (sic), but both MacDown and Mou offer previews.

http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

> Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview

Perhaps devd¹ with livereload is a good option here?

¹) http://corte.si/posts/devd/intro/

For me, the point of Markdown (and LaTeX for that matter) is that I can focus on just the writing, not what my document will look like.

Really, you can focus on writing with LaTeX? Are we talking about paragraph after paragraph of text or scientific writing with images and formulas and code, because after writing my thesis in LaTeX my experience has been different. I've lost a huge amount of time trying to adjust images, debugging compilations errors, etc.

Of course the document looks clean as it should and stands out from the rest, but still, I wasn't able to focus on writing, I had to always double-check for errors. VIM plugin for latex helped a great deal.

Give haroopad a try. It's a very young project, but it works quite well. The editor and live preview are side-by-side:

http://pad.haroopress.com/

What makes markdown annoying for me are the different flavours of markdown. Github is different from Mediawiki is different from... and so on. I find myself constantly looking up syntax just to be sure I wrote it correctly..

> Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview

try http://typora.io ?

2 things: 1) Markdown was intentionally designed to be readable without preview. 2) check out the Marked 2 app. It's basically a preview engine with lots of good export, formatting, and metadata (about your text) options.

The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf export. It'd be nice to be able to send a rendered markdown document to people without them needing to open a web browser to view it. There is a similar open source project here: https://github.com/dvcrn/markright

We are working on PDF export - it's possible that it will be a part of the 1.0.

Any plans for front matter support?

Both of these like promising applications, but I've just been using the Atom IDE (https://atom.io/) with the "Markdown Preview" and "Markdown to PDF" packages.

I use "Markdown Preview" as well. I couldn't get "Markdown to PDF" to properly apply the styling though.

It'd be nice to have it be part of the editor, but `pandoc document.md -o document.pdf` does the trick.

http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html

That's fine for a single document, but definitely doesn't work for an entire directory structure worth of Markdown files

Are you serious? Try `ls *.md | xargs -I {} pandoc {} -o {}.pdf`

Not open source or free ($14.95), but MarkdownPad Pro[0] has a PDF export feature.

[0] https://markdownpad.com/buy.html

GitHub Flavored Markdown editor with PDF export: https://github.com/srpeck/markdowned

The editor happens to fit in an HTML file <9k (excluding the behemoth browser...:).

I use Ulysses (http://www.ulyssesapp.com/) but then again, it's mostly for straight up text writing. As far as I know, it doesn't support code highlighting.

Interesting - is the idea behind free markdown desktop editing with PDF export to basically replace traditional document editors like Word or Open/Libre Office?

I'm used to thinking about markdown as just a tool for lazy people (like me) to get basic HTML formatting. Particularly for Github READMEs, and the like. LaTeX is the document preparation system that I really use (largely because of publication expectations, but I'm also pretty comfy with it at this point). The learning curve is steep.

For me markdown is easier and quicker to use than WYSISWYG editors. Combined with styling from CSS you can make some really nice looking documents from it. If I where able to export to pdf I'd definitely use it instead of word.

Serious question: why is this not implemented a Vim/Sublime/Atom/Emacs plugin?

People writing in markdown aren't necessarily developers that want all the extra baggage.

Atom already ships with a markdown preview pane as well.

With the exception of Atom, aren't those all just text editors when not extended? (Another serious question; I don't know for sure.) If so, what would be the extra baggage beyond a markdown only editor?

For Mac, not Desktop.

Currently, but Windows and Linux are coming, according to the page.

Until they ship something, that promise is completely useless for users of those platforms.

What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re almost all electron/webkit based and as such, notoriously heavy. Doing a quick test with a 3KB Markdown file with 7 different editors (including Caret), I’m finding that they all take between 60MB-130MB of memory.

RAM may be at a surplus now, but in my mind there’s no reason for such a light task to be that resource intensive. What’d I’d really like to see is a sort of “sublime” approach to markdown editing — a cross-platform, ultra-light, lean and mean editor written in C++. If all of the functionality Sublime Text encompasses only requires ~30MB of memory, something as specialized as a Markdown editor ought to be able to be chopped down to two-thirds or even half of that.

I just want to say great job with this. Really really enjoying using it so far today. More than happy to preorder.

Well done, looking forward to 2.0!

Thanks, we put a lot of love (and effort) into it so it makes us very happy to hear this.

Too bad it is not based on CommonMark. They made a great effort to make a standard.

We are moving in that direction. Please, consider that this is still a beta.

[Markdown Edit](http://markdownedit.com/) for Windows has CommonMark support.

So, it shows your text as a hybrid of plain and rich text?

Cool. I tried to write a similar app.

But I couldn't find a rich-text-view API that didn't eat all my CPU all the time.

OP: How did you manage to solve that issue? Or do you just ignore it and let the CPU go crazy?

For you vim lovers and Mac users out there, Marked 2 [1] in live reload mode works pretty great. For vim I like the vim-markdown plugin [2].

I get live preview, 9 different styles, code formatting, the ability to export to word, PDF, HTML, ODT, and RTF...and for blogging you get a word count at the bottom. It even analyzes your text for writing style like passive voice, long words, etc.

[1] - http://marked2app.com/ [2] - https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown

Getting a 404 on `http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg` - Has anyone else been able to download this morning? I also pre-ordered.

Any chance this will have a plugin language for exporters? I desperately want something like MarkdownPad but with the ability to write an exporter for BBCode.

I'm quite happy with VS Code and this Markdown CSS theme:

https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme

The automatic table formatting was pretty cool though (even if it's purely cosmetic).

What exactly makes this any better than MacDown (OSX), and Markdown Pad 2 (Windows)? Both have side live preview, and accomplish pretty much everything. There could be some QOL improements in them, but I don't see how caret.io is much better.

Some of the shortcuts look better thought out in Caret (in particular the inline file browser), but mostly, it just looks slicker. For 5 bucks, I don't expect it to be "much better", just a little better.

What Markdown is lacking, in my opinion, is a standard that was curated by the community.

What about http://commonmark.org?

I like the spirit of that effort, but it has a checkered history; it was born out of input from a private working group without input from the community [1]. I'm fundamentally against this philosophy as an open source advocate.

[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/

I can highly recommend ReText. https://github.com/retext-project/retext

Guess we can't keep waiting for the vaporware that is Mou 1.0.

Will MacDown fit the bill for the time being?

http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

http://trymarkdown.com

* Live preview

* Saves content in LocalStorage so it can persist closing the browser

It's really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they even cost money!

Really bizarre.

The only feature I think is actually pretty useful is the autocomplete of the title underlines.

Is this free?

The beta is free. The stable release is going to cost $10.

There's a big "Preorder at $5" button...so after beta no

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