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Comment by jon_richards | Hacker News Reader

The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.

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Someone is sort of building this on Obsidian: https://screen.garden

There’s also https://system3.md/relay

Thanks for the plug :)

yoooo this is sweet. Been looking for this for awhile.

I built this in college, but the code is lost. It was a week or so of hacking. I believe in you.

IIRC the trick was to get a pipeline for Markdown to HTML, render it into a WYSIWYG editor, then convert the HTML to an AST, and walk that to generate the markdown. I had to “format” both the markdown and html on each render (bidirectional round trip render) because parsing/gen wasn’t whitespace stable.

It's not collaborative, but this is what I love about Typora[0]. Click into a styled area and the styling becomes visible. Click out, and you just see the final styling.

[0] https://typora.io/

Typora is really a gem in the Markdown universe.

You can do that in IntelliJ. If there's a way to control a tab on a browser you could do that too. When I was writing my thesis, I would have `inotifywait` running on one side and when it detected the file had changed it would run the entire `pdflatex` + `bibtex` pipeline the 6 times or whatever it needed and Evince would hot-reload so I had a live preview. I'm sure a browser can do the same with some command.

Sounds like an obsidian plugin.

Someone is building that: https://screen.garden

Notepad++ and VSC both have plugins for this.

They’re fine.

Here's a comparison chart of collaboration/teamwork plugins in Obsidian.

https://system3.md/observatory/categories/collaboration-team...

Peerdraft, Relay, and Screen Garden are all based on CRDTs, and Obsidian is also currently working on native collaboration.

(disclaimer: I work on Relay)

Unfortunately, all of these are not self-hostable. I wish there was something like Nextcloud for Markdown Collaboration.

Relay now supports self hosting the collaboration server. It works with tailscale out of the box.

We still have a centralized service for authentication and authorization, but if you self host it is impossible for us to access your files.

HackMD already does this. It has a dual-pane view for raw markdown and formatted output, supports WYSIWYG editing, and allows real-time collaboration. Surprised no one mentioned it.

- [HackMD: Your Collaborative Markdown Workspace for Knowledge Sharing](https://hackmd.io/)

Why does it need to be side by side? Just let each client choose WSIWYG or raw.

When writing in text mode so that you can see what you are generating. Wouldn't really need it the other direction though.

Isn't the point of Markdown that you don't need to 'see what you are generating', you can just read it? I write Markdown every day, but I do it in a plaintext editor (with syntax highlighting). I have a keyboard shortcut to view a preview in my browser, but I don't see a great need to be viewing that preview all the time.

I think the point of Markdown is to signal that you're someone who uses things like Markdown.

Markdown is ubiquitous even in boring corporate technical writing processes nowadays. Nothing hip about it.

You might appreciate this: https://antmicro.github.io/myst-editor/

Notion had the potential to be like this, but instead it's garbage. You can put markdown in, but you can't get it out.

I think this feature is already in qownnotes.

Surprised , nobody mentioned qownnotes

Edit: I was wondering how to enable this mode because it wasn't in my qownnotes ,Here's how I found it , go to the help section , click find action , and search preview and click on show note preview panel.

Now the caveat is that if you want to see it blitted , you have to save the file once to see it automatically show in the other side. Maybe this can also be definitely automated / I feel like there was some feature that did that for that as well or atleast its very non trivial.

Edit 2 : okay so I just realized that qownnotes also ships with autosave feature which saves and thus also shows what you type in reader mode in like a 0.5 second delay. And I think there is also a way to decrease / increase the autosave part as well

Dude , I didn't realize it , but qownnotes is so good!

This is a very common mistake wasting half your screen, it can't be no killer app

Or just a plain VIEWER.

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