Show HN: Livedown – realtime Markdown previews for Vim, Emacs and Sublime

vim-instant-markdown [0] has been around for quite some time and if the gif on livedowns github page is representative provides much faster preview.

Another great editor-independent alternative is livereload + a markdown rendering plugin for your browser.

[0] https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown

On a slightly tangential note, after having used Mou for a while I've recently moved to Macdown[0] for Markdown editing on the Mac after Mou seemed to be abandoned, plus, it's open source!

I mention it as the live previews in both those apps are the real winners for me, and having something like that in my regular text editor would be awesome. Not such a fan of the browser based previews, but I'll give it a go!

[0] http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

Cool! I've been actually thinking I should get something like this for Sublime because I'm often correcting silly mistakes in my Github repo readme's that I only notice once the Markdown renders in browser.

Only minor comment is that you say "realtime" but from the demo it seems like that the view is updated only when you hit save right?

Off to test it out now!

Edit: went through all the steps and live preview doesn't seem to be working. Does the plugin work under ST3? I also assume that there's a missing step in the readme, so I cloned the git repo to the Packages sub-directory as "Livedown". Hoping I've just made a silly mistake with the setup.

Edit #2: So I verified that running from the command line works and it loads my markdown file without any problems. The link with Sublime doesn't seem to be working though, so when I make changes, I can see them in the browser window by refreshing. Guessing something is screwed up in the way the plugin is setup on my laptop.

Some bugs with vim-livedown:

- I couldn't get it to work with the after/mkd directory via pathogen. Not sure why. Moving the small bits of vimscript up in the load order worked for me.

- I think the behavior of making it auto-open upon buffer switch is un-vimlike and probably annoying. Better to just support the LivedownPreview() function. (Also, the other function has code repetition it seems.)

- The npm module (livedown) uses highlight.js for code highlighting with default options. For a standard README.md I just opened, it thought some Python code blocks were alternatively nginx or bash, because they were very short, thus did wrong syntax highlighting. You probably want to turn off language auto-detection. You can do this by doing

   hljs.configure({languages: []})

before calling hljs.highlightBlock(). HTH. I'll also open a Github issue about this.

I thought it would be realtime like http://tmpvar.com/markdown.html (although you miss all your text editor features).

This plugin acts as a browser reloader, like the ones you find for HTML/CSS, which is already helpful in itself.

This makes a similar concept with marked2 (http://marked2app.com), you write markdown on any app you like and then preview it using another tool. But personally, I prefer to do the previewing and writing on the sometime. So my ideal markdown eidtor is something like Typora (http://typora.io)

In Emacs you could achieve the same thing without node dependency, the markdown mode already supports previewing in browser so you could add two hooks (on 'markdown-mode-hook and 'after-save-hook) and call 'markdown-preview on the latter.

What does livedown add?

Is it possible to get this plugin to work with pandoc-style markdown, or is there another similar plugin to it out there?

GitHub's Atom has this as a package pre-installed. Pretty nice I must say.