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Comment by samastur | Hacker News Reader

Also, there are a bunch of editors for writing Markdown for most platforms and few (any?) for ReStructuredText.

You mean like vim, emacs, nano, kate, notepad, notepad++, wordpad, or any other plain text editor?

Really - I don't get this impulse at all. From my perspective, the entire point of markdown (and RST I assume, though I haven't used it) is that you can easily read and write it using any plain text editor.

If you are going to need a specialized editor to write it, you might as well use html, docbook, docx, odt, troff, rtf, or any of the zillion other formats.

It's been a while since I've written rST but there were good plugins for both emacs and Sublime to boot (for e.g. filling the header under/over line or toggling between different header styles)

You certainly don't need editor support, but even for a format this simple there are still things an editor can do to make it more pleasant.

At a minimum, I want support for:

- Key bindings

- Syntax coloring

- Toggle preview within the editor

I found Markdown generally had much wider support than RST.

Back to the main point, for non-developers all of those can be quite confusing especially when you're used to Word/Google docs/etc. A text-only editor where you don't get live feedback is quite an adjustment and there is a cognitive switch to the text you're writing and imagining how that text will be presented.

IDEA-based IDEs has a nice support for reStructuredText, I use this PyCharm feature almost daily.

Online: http://rst.ninjs.org/

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