The important feature worth mentioning (more than “simple and elegant” and “focused on speed and usability”) is that it directly renders the Markdown (in the editor itself, not in a separate pane or window), giving a WYSIWYG feel while still being backed by a plain-text (markdown) format that if needed can be edited directly (even in an different editor). This I've found to help enormously with being distraction-free (while still having the peace of mind from not creating an irrecoverable binary blob). Of course, to someone else it may not be a big deal.<p>Before seeing this just now, Typora (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977</a>) was the only Markdown editor I had encountered that does this, but it is not open-source. Another was the halfway-in-between (shows both syntax and rendering) Abricotine (<a href="https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine</a>) which has the sense to mention it as the main feature: “Markdown editor with inline preview” and “you can preview your document directly in the text editor rather than in a side pane”.<p>Are there any other editors like this?
I decided to give it a try, and it's almost a 100MB to download. Due to being unsigned, Mac OSX blocked running this web app. Why isn't there a demo online that I can try in my web browser? Isn't this supposed to be a simple electron app?<p>Anyways, I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock.<p>The text rendering is awful. It's blurry and smudged on my non-retina display due to not using subpixel smoothing. Here's a screenshot comparing Atom (top) to Mark Text (bottom): <a href="https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4</a><p>Highlighting and pasting text is totally unpredictable. Try pasting in 10 * characters and you'll see that it's almost impossible. How are you supposed to do this? Sometimes it replaces * with \*, sometimes not. And sometimes it replaces it with - ??<p>I tried to copy paste a few paragraphs of text a few times, and once it turned into this strange highlighted text that when I started a new paragraph, deleted all of my newlines. What's going on?<p>This editor does not seem ready yet.
I’m currently using Vnote <a href="https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/</a> after trying Typora and other Markdown editors. What I like about Vnote is it is based on Qt and has most of the functions from Typora plus Vim mode, a lot of keyboard shortcuts, good search capacity across different notebooks (which basically folders and sub folders containing markdown files), and some extensions like MathJax, Flowchart, Mermaid. Vnote (and Typora) supports defining folders for images or attachments (relative or absolute path). Even though it does not have a kind of webcliper extension for browser like Joplin, you can copy the content of a webpage and paste it directly into Vnote (also Typora), it can reformat the content as markdown and copy the associated images to the defined folder. I used Joplin before and still like it a lot but recently switched to Vnote and version-control the notes with git. For that, I can "sync" the content of my notebooks using git across different devices (for iOS, I use Working Copy as a git client and it can render the markdown notes with images). Vnote needs to store the structure of your notebook and other metadata such as tags in JSON files. You do need to have those JSON files otherwise Vnote will not display the tree of your notebooks. But basically you can use other editors to open Vnote notebooks because they are just folders and markdown files.
I am very happy to see the discussion about Mark Text on Hacker News. I am the author and main maintainer of Mark Text. I will seriously think about the suggestions for Mark Text which you comment here. I also welcome everyone to submit the issue and suggestion to Mark Text on GitHub <a href="https://github.com/marktext/marktext" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/marktext/marktext</a>. Thank you everyone.
I'm really interested by the sponsorship bits at the bottom; they're using both Open Collective and Patreon. It seems to me that one of the problems with going beyond the scratch-a-personal-itch level is how unsustainable it can be. I'd love to see that normalized, so that people who create a lot of value for others aren't economically penalized for choosing open source.
I get that Electron is accepted as a way to do multi-OS apps. However, whenever possible, I find there are better OS specific apps. As I use Linux and Mac, I find the best app for each.<p>For example, on my work mac I use Ulysses, and sync to a cloud folder. Then on Linux, I use caret or typora with the same synced folder. Caret/typora aren't as nice as Ulysses (IMO), but as they all support markdown, all three are fully compatible. I'd rather not use an inferior app only because it's cross platform. Since the content is transferable between apps, and is synced outside the app, this seems like a pretty good compromise.<p>If I could buy a high quality markdown editor on Linux that rivaled Ulysses I would.
I'm surprised by how much I like this idea. (I have not tried it yet.)<p>Right now, I use vim for almost all of my text editing. I pop into JetBrains IDEs when their analysis tools or debugger integration are helpful to me. And I use VSCode for most markdown editing. This, if it's good, could replace VSCode for me with a tool that's much better for the purpose I need. So there's basically no new trade-off for me... I've already caved on the electron front for markdown editing anyway. This could just make the payoff for that trade much higher.
I keep a pseudo-bullet journal in markdown. Unfortunately, I rely on two things this (and a lot of other) Markdown editors won't do:<p>First, "-", "+" and "*" are all legal bullet characters for creating unordered lists.<p>This allows you to put further semantic meaning into your plaintext (for me that's notes, new tasks, events respectively) though it does get lost in render. This editor loses that distinction.<p>Second, and this one drives me nuts with MD editors not supporting it, "+<TAB>text" is just as legal as "+<SPACE>text" for Markdown--the spec, such that it exists, is just whitespace after the bullet.<p>I personally use that to create a bujo-style gutter column between the <UL> bullets and the text where I can insert a space and a resolution symbol without disturbing plaintext alignment.<p>So, "+<TAB>New Task" eventually becomes "+<SPACE>^<TAB>New Task" to indicate it's been tracked, for a final render of "o ^ New Task"<p>nvAlt is one of the few that does this right, and will actually copy the "+<TAB>" to the next line as a leader instead of only copying "+<SPACE>" or not treating the "+" as a bullet at all if a tab follows.<p>This editor won't even let you input a tab character. Tab always indents, whether it's opt-Tab, ctrl-Tab, or what.<p>I think Markdown is great, but the value I've seen is more in the semi-formatted plaintext representation than just being a text-based way to WYSIWYG. If I want WYSIWYG there are significantly more direct ways to get that. I wish more of the MD editors concentrated on optimizing the plaintext experience, as nvAlt is getting a bit long in the tooth.
The inline MathJax editor with live-preview is nice, as is proper markdown parsing (you can put code-blocks inside lists! <i>gives side-eye to Bear.app</i>). And it's got a pleasing stylesheet. But I don't really see what this brings to the table to be honest.<p>It's electron so it doesn't feel native, and it takes over a second to open a nearly-empty document. OS-level key-bindings (Ctrl+A/E etc on Mac) are overridden or broken in weird ways, and some usual typing conventions don't work (double-enter to break out of a code-block). You can't click to move the cursor in a number of situations. The "type @ to insert something" seems weird - markdown by its nature is easy to type. The editor kinda supports tabs but I couldn't figure out how to switch them without the mouse.<p>All this said, my biggest gripe is that I can't change the font to a monospace font. Yes I'm writing prose, but I want to write in a monospace font. Always. I understand this is a personal preference, and the author lets you change the font but only to a small handful of pre-determined fonts - there is no option to use a custom font. That is just..weird.<p>This thing shows some promise if it can be made faster and made to support a more ergonomic writing environment. As it is it's just kinda a neat demo with some cool features but an overall unfinished UX.
What I need from a markdown editor is the preview and vim keybindings that's why my editor of choice is vscode + vim keybindings + markdown all in one extension. Beside this combo all you can have is either vim keybindings without preview or preview without vim keybindings so if somehow marktext (which is great because open source) can have both it will be my editor of choice without any doubt.
This looks really nice...<p>... except like every other apps around there it only supports Markdown<p>Feature request:<p>Please add an option to convert the resulting file to a better format like Asciidoc and other better markup formats<p>Maybe using pandoc.<p>WHY?<p>I feel unwell with Markdown<p>Markdown deserve credits for having found a real important problem to solve<p>on the other hand, it's not a good solution to that problem<p>... but just good enough that its bad aspects are not obvious<p>Combined with its current popularity, this makes progress very hard<p>But there are so much things that are wrong with Markdown.<p>Nested lists? I get them wrong every time.<p>Images syntax is bad.<p>Tables syntax is worse.<p>No table of contents.<p>You can't have variables.<p>You can't include another file.<p>In the end, every website does its own markdown because Markdown sucks.<p>Interopability? Ah ah. Some have tried.
That's a rabbit hole to get into.<p>In the end, Markdown is just a starting point... To a real format like Asciidoc.
At least for installation on another distribution it doesn't suggest you to install apt-get.<p><a href="http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/" rel="nofollow">http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/</a>
It's almost perfect. The minor but irritating problem with it is that I can't seem to use my own fonts in the editor; the selections for the editor and code fonts are fixed. Worse, if I manually edit ~/.config/marktext/preferences.json and change editorFontFamily and codeFontFamily to my preferred fonts, Mark Text fails to launch at all, whining that they "should be equal to one of the allowed values".<p>Like, what gives? Why restrict this? It obviously ain't an Electron limitation, since plenty of other Electron apps support my fonts just fine.
This is really nice, but I find whenever I try one of these types of apps to type or edit real text for more than a few minutes, I find myself wanting pote (plain old text editor) features. The first thing I miss is generally line-moving, but more accumulate to the point where I eventually move back to my favoured pote of the moment.
As a Typora user, I'm glad that this editor includes a table of contents area in its sidebar. I had to dig into the docs to find that it does indeed have this. ToC navigation helps me <i>so</i> much for being/getting organized.
seems better than typora though I miss the file-system-layout on the left side when I have a lot of md files.<p>one thing I like to have for both is the vim key bindings, so I don't need use up-down-left-right keypad to move cursors, for example if I type <i></i>bold the editor will auto match <i></i> to be <i></i>bold<i></i> which is nice, but I still have to move my keys to skip the two <i></i> just added, in fact many editors provides autocomplete or bracket complete but they do not provide a way for me to skip the stuff they added easily, or I must be missing something basic here.
which apps support full embedded HTML? I like markdown but I run into exceptions where I need some html all the time. It could be a short span for color or an iframe for an example and most libraries and apps seem to fail there.