ReText – Markdown Editor with Live Preview | Hacker News Reader

ReText – Markdown Editor with Live Preview

sourceforge.net

64 pointsredthrow55 comments

Sorry to take this off topic but seeing as many here have developed their own markdown editors - I have a specific use case where I want to integrate a markdown editor with my backend (multiple technically unskilled users adding information in markdown, to render in html and eventually be pushed to mobile devices) I MUST HAVE a side-by-side editor (currently I use mark able.in which I have found satisfactory) but it doesn't have an api and often doesn't maintain scroll position.

If anyone is interested in making available their editor/working with me in implementing this solution then my humble startup could spare a few peanuts, please reach out to me(Python/flask backend, with PostgreSQL for persistence)

This guy: https://stackedit.io/

It's opensource and have export hooks!

I mostly use StackEdit https://stackedit.io/

By far the most elegant markdown editor I found.

StackEdit is very nice, it's certainly one of the best.

What's the target group of Markdown editors with preview?

I love Markdown and use it a lot, but do people really wonder what their headers and bullet lists are going to look like?

  I like having a markdown preview available for the following reasons:
  * I can quickly tell if I screwed up my whitespace
  * I can experiment with features I'm unsure about (images with links)

I like having a markdown preview available for the following reasons: * I can quickly tell if I screwed up my whitespace * I can experiment with features I'm unsure about (images with links)

The thing with two spaces at the end of a line indicating line break doesn't make sense to me. It is invisible in most editors, so it is easy to mess up.

That reminds me of a [joke response](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8767426) to a vid on the antagonistic programming language, intercal: block comments ought to be text between two lines of 5 spaces each :B

In fairness to markdown, it probably isn't convention to break up a paragraph on different lines with the expectation that it will wrap.

An editor with markdown syntax highlighting or preview helped me learn markdown and still helps me understand the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. It is essential with deeper nesting.

I was surprised by the ambiguities and subtleties of markdown. I was surprised that Atom's markdown preview does not yet match the rendering on github.

Or consider some of the bug reports verses pope / vim-markdown:

  * #60: inappopropriate italic: foo_<any non-alphanumeric character>bar
  * #42: Bold links not being recognized
  * #37: Incorrect processing of "_"
  * #27: Ending an italic section with an escaped asterisk isn't parsed properly

After first authoring in vim, my preferred markdown editor with preview is http://pad.haroopress.com/ by @rhiokim (open source is promised). Scrolling synced between editor and preview is one of the killer feature.

I found preview very useful when working recently on https://github.com/lloydde/sdc-1/blob/doc-coal-setup-rewrite...

I think the intent of Markdown is more the plain syntax and non-programmer look of it than the readability.

Headers, tables, headers, blockquotes, code blocks, links, and footnotes can make text hard to read. Especially link syntax can hurt readability, even if you use [url] variables instead of the full (http) url; previews trim that away, although I'm slowly become broken inside enough to find Markdown tables easier to read than HTML renderings.

URLs, footnotes, and the big bad, tables of content, are the kind of set-and-forget stuff you'd probably rather prefer in a separate document or something.

But it's also worth keeping in mind that people use Markdown for very different things, and those who aren't writing extensive READMEs with tables, links, and a bunch of headers won't run into those problems; I love using Markdowns on forums, for instance, but I don't actually read those comments the same way I would an article or a README.

Previews are a little like fuzzy post-deploy tests for typos, poor phrasing, and syntax errors. :)

People who are editing markdown with mathematical formulas in it (via some sort of MathJax extension, like the markdown editor in https://cloud.sagemath.com) really want to be able to see a preview of their formulas, to make sure they are correct.

I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to start encouraging students to write in Markdown instead of Word. It would be a lot easier to do that with an application like this. But I haven't looked into it too closely, so I'm not sure what the best tools are for starting to use Markdown with students.

What? Why? Word and md/html solve quite different problems, the way I see it. Word is very much for paper-oriented documents while md/html are for screen-first.

Word is far from my favorite document preparation system [1] (let's call it that), but it still has many advantages over markdown,

* Html rendering has no concept of pagination. Paginating naively from html (ie printing from a browser) makes ugly documents.

* Word has tools for managing references and bibliography generation

* Also automatic numbering and referencing of tables, figures, etc.

Those are just OTOH features I'd consider important for writing a high school history report or whatever. If this were word '97 we were talking about, I'd understand, but modern Word is a quite powerful tool.

I don't mean to bash or disrepect, just genuinely curious if you'd considered this or you had specific reasons for switching to markdown.

[1] I've really been liking LyX for the past years, but it might be a bit much for your typical high school student. I've been considering trying out an asciidoc -> docbook -> (latex -> pdf or straight docbook to html) workflow. Maybee ascii would interest you, similar plain-text formatting like md but more full featured.

Fair questions.

Word works well for students' final work, but it seems to get in the way when students are building their understanding of a topic. I like that Markdown has enough formatting options to organize a document, but not so many options that people get lost in modifying fonts and font sizes, etc.

I'm curious to see if using Markdown while doing exploratory assignments would help students focus more on the information they're learning and documenting, rather than how the final document looks. I'd also like to expose students to a different approach to structuring documents; for many of them, they haven't used anything other than Word.

Printing from the browser has far more to do with the fundamental error of allowing a site's designer to specify formatting than any inherent limitations of HTML. It's possible to create semantic content from a browser page (e.g., with Pandoc or Calibre) and print that. I actually resort far more often than I care to admit to re-tagging content and rendering it either as simplified HTML, Markdown, or LaTeX, for readability's sake.

No disrespect to the OP but the Stackedit editor at https://stackedit.io would be good. No software to install and loads of options for synchronizing and publishing their notes.

Stackedit looks great, thanks for the reference.

I guess the simplest thing would just be to first introduce them to some simple rules, like "this is how you indicate a header", "this is how you indicate emphasis (like italics)".

After all, isn't conventions like that for plain text writing how markdown emerged in the first place?

Teaching the rules is straightforward, I just don't know the available tools very well. I use Markdown on GitHub mostly.

My students will need to print more of their work than I do, they'll want to work on their local filesystem most of the time, and they'll want to work on documents at home as well. I haven't followed the Markdown ecosystem well enough to know which tools to recommend to students and staff, so I appreciate hearing about new tools like the ones mentioned in this thread.

A problem with live preview is that in most iterations, after the first page you cease to see the preview of what you type, and you need to scroll down on the preview to have it match where you are in the source text.

I had developed a few years ago a markdown editor with live preview, with a mechanism that synchronized the source and the preview, scroll-wise, so the preview would always display the part that was being edited.

It didn't take off (at all) so I let it go but I wish there would be a standardized way to do this; I'm surprised this problem isn't otherwise addressed, because it's a real problem for me.

Does't most editors do that now? I've actually never used one that doesn't.

Still never seen one that does.

If you're editing sufficiently complex text, instant preview will show where you've fouled up tagging. Missed pairs, headings, whitespace. And tables. Especially tables.

It depends on the complexity of your document. For example, writing a scientific manuscript is a horror in any kind of Markdown. No proper support or integration for references, equations etc. Everything is hacked together. Even LateX is better at it. I understand that Markdown is intended for simple documents. But then, I don't see why I should write Markdown instead of just directly typing it out in Libreoffice Writer.

I haven't tried it yet, but there's this: http://scholarlymarkdown.com/

I use my own markdown preview tool to preview what my WP blog post looks like. It's like MS LiveWriter but supports markdown.

I find it easier to write text, insert code and add images in a desktop tool and get live visual feedback, than doing it in the WP editor page, saving and refreshing the post.

I don't find it that odd to want to see a preview, even though I have a pretty good idea of what it will look like. I've been using this editor for a while http://macdown.uranusjr.com

Folks who use WordPress or other CMS, and want to (or are forced to) move to statically generated sites?

Looks good! I've also worked on a markdown editor since january but it's web-based and while it's hooked on my blogging engine, I'm planning to make it available as a standalone library down the road. It might not be obvious, but the markdown on top is the actual editor. You can test ride it.

http://ecrire.io/

More the merrier!

(Small disclaimer: I have never tested it on IE...)

I like this kind of partial rendering, which preserves the markdown markup. Months ago, I've investigated some alternatives in this regard, such as:

https://github.com/lepture/editor

https://github.com/airpub/ninja

But nothing was perfect for my criterion. I hope your solution will become the one I've been looking for.

One concern is that it doesn't seem to support the ``` syntax, but the ~~~ syntax. Would that be possible to also support the former? Also, are you planning to conform to the CommonMark specification?

You can also checkout http://dillinger.io/ for a web-based Markdown editor

This is the first time I learned about WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM

Both plain text editors (e.g. gedit) and word processors (e.g. LibreOffice Writer) frustrated me so this is perfect for my needs.

That's pretty much the prime directive of semantic formatting systems -- LaTeX, HTML (as originally envisioned), Markdown, and the like.

The ironic truth is that "responsive" design is a horribly late-to-the-party awareness of this, and often accomplished by tremendously convoluted design -- adding more complexity to systems in which less is preferred.

But yes, it's quite an epiphany when you finally get it.

Texts (http://texts.io) is a WYSIWYM editor for Markdown.

Check out LyX! Not affiliated or anything, just great software that for me hits the sweetspot between Writer and hand-coding Latex. It's simple and lightweight yet powerful and easy to learn.

http://www.lyx.org/

Thanks! Does it have live preview? (It's not listed in the features page.)

Also the UI looks really complex compared to ReText. It looks good for people who write complex documents (e.g. math textbooks) though.

It does not have live preview, it uses latex in the backend so you have to compile to view your changes.

I have found the interface mostly intuitive myself (ymmv). It has absolutely no problem doing simple documents, quite the opposite actually, it makes it very simple.

Looking at the web page, I agree it does not make this very clear. The docs come as LyX documents packaged with the software, if you feel like having a look, install it and hit help > tutorial

Any alternative for Windows users?

http://markdownpad.com/

I wrote a chrome extension called Symplie that lets you write and view notes in Markdown: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/symplie/kjadigajmc...

Pretty sharp. I like the preview toggle - seems to me that keeping the preview visable all the time like other editors is a waste of space.

Since it saves to Chrome local storage, wouldn't notes get synced along with other Chrome data?

I'm actually just using IndexedDB so it doesn't sync. I use Chrome storage to cache the license (in case you were wondering about the permissions). There is a special Chrome storage sync api but it's limited to 800kb I think. I'm still exploring a good way to implement (unlimited) sync. Thanks for the feedback!

All this stuff with Markdown. I suppose it's either a matter of time, or it's already happened: a Markdown literate programming environment, a la Donald Knuth.

I gave it a shot at one point:

https://github.com/mnemnion/marmalade

Lately I've been using babel in org-mode, it's a bit clunky, but it works. Metalanguages require really, really good tooling; the first project to solve the basic problems is likely to prove quite popular.

Note that while I used to think literate programming was cool, it's actually a subset of the kind of living programmable document which Babel can produce. I'm more impressed at the moment by the ways one can chain various languages together with the results of calling them.

Will someone please develop one with spell check? Dillinger.io fails this too. I use ia writer but its not ideal for other features.

StackEdit [1] has spell check. Or more specifically, it does not block the browser's native spell check in the editor. It also doesn't suffer from slow down with larger documents [2].

[1] https://github.com/benweet/stackedit

[2] https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger/issues/301

ReText has spell checker: Edit -> Spell check -> Enable

Alternative for Mac users: http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

Another one for Mac: [Multimarkdown Composer][1]. A friend of mine uses it and I think it worked well.

[1]: http://multimarkdown.com/

Yet another alternative for Mac users: http://25.io/mou/

They're probably not as feature-rich, but I find the plugins available for Atom and Sublime Text to meet this need.

vmd [1] is handy for quick previewing, especially if you're editing for GitHub.

If I had to jump out of my regular editor to write Markdown or reStructuredText, I probably wouldn't be using them.

[1] https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/vmd

I didn't find it's usability for RST docs all that great.

Markdown seems to be a lightweight, readable, unobtrusive markup language for relatively simple documents.

Considering that, hasn't markdown (or one of its dialects) failed if someone feels motivated to use a dedicated editor for it? The side-by-side preview feels particularly ironic considering markdown's purpose, though I guess it is nice to have as a check that you didn't mess up closing a paren and other syntax-things.

> nice to have as a check

I think this is exactly the purpose of having live preview, just like it's nice to have spell checker even for experienced writers. It's nice to know when something goes wrong immediately.

Also, Markdown's syntax spec, while relatively short, is not something people can memorize immediately, especially for syntax elements they don't use often.

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