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gpmcadam

The problem which this is trying to solve is that clients like WYSIWYG and developers want control over their markup.

But, why not make a simple WYSIWYG -> Markdown editor? I've never found an elegant and mature editor which does this

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WYSIWYGs have its own set of problems and this is why most popular websites have WYSIWYG editor but do have Markdown.

Some issues:

  - Portability
  - Error prone (want to close a bold style but can't unless you copy/paste text)
  - Doesn't work well on mobile/tablet
  - Clutter the HTML as the rendering of WYSIWYG needs a lot of wrapper

>this is why no popular websites have WYSIWYG editor but do have Markdown.

huh?

Both Wordpress and Gmail have full blown wysiwyg, and many other sites such as facebook and Twitter have wysiwyg-like features in their messaging/commenting. What site bigger than these use markdown?

Wordpress WYSIWYG (TinyMCE) is notorious for bugs - I experienced them first hand - and it's not a website, it's a software people install. Big difference.

I had forgotten about Gmail, so I guess this is the exception to the rules. On the other hand, markdown is supported on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Github, and many more.

Stack Overflow and Github's primary audience is developers. Reddit's started out with a mostly developer audience and still today has a huge crossover. It absolutely makes sense to support mark down if your audience is developers.

I don't find gmail to be an exception to the rule at all - all the big webmail providers offer full WYSIWYG support.

What "wysiwyg-like" features do Twitter and Facebook have? I'm not aware of any.

User tagging. It's not a traditional WYSIWYG editor feature, but it means the implementation of the actual editor input field faces the same problems WYSIWYG editors do.

> facebook and Twitter have wysiwyg-like features

Yeah, you see plain text, and you get plain text. Big deal.

> What site bigger than these use markdown?

reddit, stackoverflow, discourse, all use MD. Granted, none of them are bigger than gmail (AFAIK), but they do add a pretty huge base.

> Yeah, you see plain text, and you get plain text. Big deal.

Nope, not quite. @Tagging someone will suggest and highlight users. Not a full blown WYSIWYG but in the same calibre of technical problems and reasons why people stay away from WYSIWYG.

While the opposite of your suggestion, the side by side editor -> preview (like Atom has) is so elegant to me.

Really? When I re-read in the preview window and spot a typo I naturally click in the preview window to set the caret there. But of course nothing happens. I have to map what I am seeing on the right to what is on the left, find the typo again, and then do the fix. To each their own but I find it to be awful UX.

Smarts in the preview pane to reposition to the selected point in the edit file would be useful. Highlighting corresponding text -- e.g., highlight a passage on preview and have the editor scroll to the top of that section and highlight it.

I was wondering about the solution to this very problem. I, personally, like the approach of markdown and live-updated rendered HTML side-by-side with toolbar buttons for markup, the approach that MarkdownPad[1] takes.

[1] http://markdownpad.com/

A few years ago I developed a rich text to markdown converter, completely client side in the browser: http://markitdown.medusis.com

It could be a first step to build what you're descibing.

This.

I'm still waiting for an editor that let's swap editing between WYSIWYG and raw markup (for Markdown).

(I could try to do it myself, but I'm not much of a front-end guy).

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