Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor | Hacker News Reader

Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor

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I've been using dillinger for a while, and I'm very happy with it: http://dillinger.io/

Also, it is open source: https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger

It appears to only be distributed as a web app. Apples and oranges. Also the editor looks like a code editor (Erato also kind of does, but it has a margin and it doesn't have line numbers by default).

I wonder if Erato is also just using the Ace editor as that preview on the side looks like a webview. If they did that's cool, but then this basically the same thing as Dillinger.

Erato uses a custom editor, not Ace.

Pretty good!

It's great to be able to run it locally too, so I can run it offline! But how do you open another file when you're offline? (So no dropbox etc)

Looks like Mou (http://mouapp.com/). Does anyone know the differences?

Erato has a more flexible window layout than Mou, and provides some nice editor shortcuts that programmers are used to (e.g. better identation features and block autocomplete).

It would be nice if that was mentioned somewhere. Looking at the website now I just see a Mou clone with less choice and no customizability.

Erato doesn't change the text size in the editor window, just in the live preview window. Mou is clever in this regard but its cleverness that doesn't improve the experience IMHO.

This is optional. Mou has several editor themes and at least half of them don't do this—only the ones that end in "+" do.

the price!

This has the same design as http://mouapp.com which has been on the market for a long time now.

Mou is donation based so you can try before you donate. The developer is very responsive and the app is constantly updated.

I really don't get it.

on top of that Mou supports custom styles, which I see no mention of from Erato. I happily donated to Mou, and really don't see why anyone would choose Erato over it.

Chipping in to say the same thing. Mou is a great product and I've convinced a number of people in my office to start using it.

This feels like a different shade of the same idea.

I use Sublime Text 2 with Markdown Preview[1] + Live Reload[2]

* [1] - https://github.com/revolunet/sublimetext-markdown-preview

* [2] - https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2

Yeah that's what I do, but I use application called Marked to preview it.

Marked is a smart idea, because people love their text editors.

Same setup. People interested in markdown only editors must be writers which don't edit any other format.

Otherwise, I don't get why you would bother learning several pieces of software, and each probably lacking many features of Sublime or other powerful text editors.

Does anyone know what happened to the push (primarily by Atwood) to create a spec for Markdown (possibly with a different name)?

Apparently it wasn't very successful: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800

That was posted the same day Atwood made the suggestion and although it would be nice if Gruber would play along, there is no need he actually does.

Erato and Mou are all great but they both lack the single most important feature: An iPad app with iCloud sync.

I've also stopped using iA Writer for their, at times, weird Markdown interpretation.

It drives me nuts that iA Writer has created a "Markdown" editor that only supports a subset of Markdown, despite the fact MD has hardly any features to begin with.

All of these (Erato, Mou, MarkdownLive) have noticeable lag while editing. I get that you have to parse and render the markdown, but with todays computing power, is it too much to ask to see the text I just typed as soon as I press the keys?

This is especially bad when there are images on the page. Why not just render the current block and leave the rest of the page as is.

Also check out my fork of Markdown live, which is exactly this + open-source + bugs + shitty syntax highlighting.

https://github.com/vojto/markdownlive

When you say +bugs do you mean you introduced some bugs? :-P

Thanks for the link btw, I've been using Mou and, being as I am, I always like to read source code while learning, so I really appreciate open source apps.

Why does this, and other markdown editors, use a fixed width font? It would be nice to have a variable width font by default and a quick toggle button or menu item to switch to a fixed width font.

Erato uses a fixed-width font because it is easy to read and makes formatting very clear. You can change the font in the Settings. I like your idea of a toggle though, I'll give it some thought and see how it might work.

You see, on the one hand I think this is kind of admirable. Yay, I type my markdown over here and I can instantly see the bits I got wrong over there.

But I also can't help thinking, if you're going to all that effort why not go full WYSIWYG, with Markdown as the file format? (You'd need some kind of support for merge markers I suppose, I guess that'd be kind of tricky.)

You know what it reminds me of? Wordperfect 5.1's Reveal Codes :-)

You mean something like this? http://www.texts.io/

Trying this out now, It's actually pretty nice. I get that It's a visual editor that uses Markdown as a storage format, but it still would be nice if it would actually let me type Markdown - interestingly it seems to be pretty indecisive on whether or not I should be able to that.

I can type a # and it will automatically turn the text into a Title which is nice, but any other Markdown-like syntax is printed verbatim, which is odd because when I save and reload it will suddenly render it as Markdown just fine.

If I could write Markdown in this and had some way to refresh the editor to visualize it as an alternative to the insert bindings, personally I'd be sold on this for sure.

I would rather type than reach for the mouse. Vim, anyone?

Something I've been looking for for a while: A Markdown WYSIWYG. I personally dislike WYSIWYG, but for clients, it cannot be beaten. Now, most things that clients do in CMSs can be done with Markdown, and it avoids complications with weird HTML output, them trying to do unconventional styling (aka "ruining the website). So something like CKEditor or TinyMCE but outputting Markdown, and constrained to Markdown's limitations.

Does such a thing exist?

I am currently working on one! It is not release ready but if want here is a simple demo.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52646091/syntax/selectio...

I want to totally abolish two window mode and all uncertainties about how the output will look like. my target the same as yours, to make the learning curve less steep.

You may want to try this one: http://hallojs.org/demo/markdown/

You can edit in both the rich text editor and in the textarea, and changes will get synced across.

That was just a quick demo. There are things that could be improved, especially by switching to a slightly better HTML-to-Markdown library.

yes, it's here: http://www.texts.io/

This needs a linux version... Great looking tool!

For Linux folks out there, try ReText http://sf.net/projects/retext/ It is an editor for Markdown and reStructuredText. There is syntax highlighting and a live preview mode. The app is written with the Qt library (so it probably looks best in KDE), but it works and looks fine in Gnome.

FYI a search for "Erato" in the UK App Store is yielding no results. But the App Store link on your site works ...

It seems the App Store is slow to index apps, so it will be searchable in a few hours.

Here's a worthy contender: https://github.com/rvagg/morkdown Open source, Node.js and Chrome based, Github flavored.

This is nice. I use Byword which doesn't have monospaced fonts for code blocks, but does the preview right in the editor. It's nice for non-code related markdown stuff.

Can you change the title to: Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor for Mac Markdown is used on many systems and not everyone is intrested in reading about Mac software.

Out of curiosity, why not support 10.6? Are there some features that rely on Lion or ML? If 10.6 had been supported, I would have purchased a copy.

In short: yes. The step from Snow Leopard to Lion was huge API-wise and a lot changed in how document based applications work.

I use Mou and am pretty happy with it, though I'll switch in an instant if this support Github Flavoured Markdown..

GH Flavoured Markdown is on the roadmap. Sign up for the newsletter at http://9muses.se to get notified when it arrives.

I'd love to see something like the editor in Medium, but implementing the whole markdown and that can run offline.

Not directly related but I'm adding offline editing/export to the editor of http://postagon.com in the near future.

Does this support/show Github's extensions to markdown. In particular, syntax highlighting for languages?

It does not at the moment. Support for some GitHub extensions is planned for the future though.

For this I use grunt-markdown and grunt-watch (that integrates LiveReload).

I don't feel the difference between Erato and Mou is worth $5.99.

Are chromeless markdown text editors the new static site generators?

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