Hacker News Reader

Comment by rodion_89 | Hacker News Reader

Kinda surprised by the rise in markdown editors whose selling point is the live preview mode. I always felt that the best feature of markdown was that the raw text made it somewhat obvious how it should be rendered. If a preview mode is need I almost want to jump straight to a WYSIWYG editor

View on HN

It's both a great way to learn markdown and be sure that your output is valid when having to write things in markdown. I can't tell you how many times I've realized I made a mistake when I've already pushed a readme to github and saw the rendered markdown there...

I wonder how feasible it would be to make a markdown sanity checker, to catch common errors, or if it would have too many false alarms. "Are you sure you wanted to make a paragraph with a ton of asterisks in it, or did you really want a list?" etc.

But really, when you make errors like that, it means the markup language isn't intuitive enough. I can never ever remember the proper order for links in Markdown, I hate it. I'd rather have a WYSIWYG-ish editor that both shows your markup (so you can edit it with the keyboard) but also styles bold, headers etc on the fly.

I think there are two kinds of users of Markdown. One is those who don't need or want WYSIWYG. The other still want WYSIWYG but don't want to shift+arrowing around or constantly leaving the keyboard to reach for the mouse. The number of Markdown editors with live preview probably says that the latter group is actually not small.

This is actually my take on things. I use Mou as a writer and I think the live preview thing helps me get an idea what the final result will be. Being able to set up the CSS based on a website is also useful for knowing how headlines will line up, for example.

I find Markdown best for writing in but looking at the processed output best for proofreading.

This. I've been making my living as a writer for ~7 years and have used Markdown as my dominant syntax for about 6.5 of those years. When I proofread, especially a long post, a preview is great.

Of course, for that, I usually just use Marked, but I'm never opposed to seeing more Markdown tools. Ever.

Agreed. We actually wrote a WYSIWYG editor on top of Markdown last year (https://github.com/wiredcraft/moleskin) but never ended up pushing it out: Markdown is simple as it is, syntax highlighting should be enough.

Call me lazy, but do you have a demo somewhere?

Somehow, in my head, I heard it as "Call Me Maybe".

You can `git clone git@github.com:Wiredcraft/Moleskin.git` and then open the example in `examples/angular/index.html`.

https://rawgit.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin/master/examples/angul...

Thanks for that; I had forgotten about rawgit.

It is probably because live preview is considerably easier to implement than a good code editor like "Markdown completion".

I run a small website that uses markdown files to render content. Users just need to upload those files and the site is updated accordingly. The haroopad editor, mou, and others help them get visual feedback on what they are doing before submitting and refreshing the site.

what are you using? I'm looking at this now for my personal website. MDWiki looks interesting: http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md

I use (Harpjs)[http://harpjs.com/], it's a nodejs application. It can act as a web server serving static HTML or it can do live rendering of JADE files, MARKDOWN files, LESS files, etc., and comes with templating and yelding mechanism.

Bonus: it can compile any "dynamic"* site it can process to complete static HTML.

* quote, because it's still based on flat files, not on any kind of database.

Thanks!

I find having a live preview really gives me a better feel for the flow of the document. I love Markdown for it's simplicity, but that doesn't mean I only ever want to see it rendered in plain text.

My biggest use for Markdown is writing my README.md files for my Github projects. And while I do care how it looks plain, I care more about how it looks to users who visit my project's Github page.

The one place I find that useful is for blog posts. I like having the ability to apply the blog's CSS to the markdown source before posting to make sure it looks right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com