Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

I tried the application, and it looks great!<p>One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don&#x27;t is wordcount. In Caret, the document wordcount is always visible in the upper right corner, and if I select some text, the wordcount for the selection is displayed again. Others have mentioned the lack of live-preview as a deal-breaker, but I&#x27;m ok with this because of the easy, obvious shortcut. My main purpose with Markdown editors is writing READMEs and blog posts, and I usually don&#x27;t keep live-preview open as I&#x27;m writing.<p>The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.

Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time.<p>The lack of good desktop Markdown editors used to haunt me, until I started building one my own and realized how poor the support for Markdown in C++ was.

The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf export. It&#x27;d be nice to be able to send a rendered markdown document to people without them needing to open a web browser to view it. There is a similar open source project here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dvcrn&#x2F;markright" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dvcrn&#x2F;markright</a>

Serious question: why is this not implemented a Vim&#x2F;Sublime&#x2F;Atom&#x2F;Emacs plugin?

For <i>Mac</i>, not <i>Desktop</i>.

What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re almost all electron&#x2F;webkit based and as such, notoriously heavy. Doing a quick test with a 3KB Markdown file with 7 different editors (including Caret), I’m finding that they all take between 60MB-130MB of memory.<p>RAM may be at a surplus now, but in my mind there’s no reason for such a light task to be that resource intensive. What’d I’d really like to see is a sort of “sublime” approach to markdown editing — a cross-platform, ultra-light, lean and mean editor written in C++. If all of the functionality Sublime Text encompasses only requires ~30MB of memory, something as specialized as a Markdown editor ought to be able to be chopped down to two-thirds or even half of that.

I just want to say great job with this. Really really enjoying using it so far today. More than happy to preorder.<p>Well done, looking forward to 2.0!

Too bad it is not based on CommonMark. They made a great effort to make a standard.

So, it shows your text as a hybrid of plain <i>and</i> rich text?<p>Cool. I tried to write a similar app.<p>But I couldn&#x27;t find a rich-text-view API that didn&#x27;t eat all my CPU all the time.<p>OP: How did you manage to solve that issue? Or do you just ignore it and let the CPU go crazy?

For you vim lovers and Mac users out there, Marked 2 [1] in live reload mode works pretty great. For vim I like the vim-markdown plugin [2].<p>I get live preview, 9 different styles, code formatting, the ability to export to word, PDF, HTML, ODT, and RTF...and for blogging you get a word count at the bottom. It even analyzes your text for writing style like passive voice, long words, etc.<p>[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marked2app.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marked2app.com&#x2F;</a> [2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plasticboy&#x2F;vim-markdown" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plasticboy&#x2F;vim-markdown</a>

Getting a 404 on `<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.caret.io&#x2F;Caret.dmg`" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.caret.io&#x2F;Caret.dmg`</a> - Has anyone else been able to download this morning? I also pre-ordered.

Any chance this will have a plugin language for exporters? I desperately want something like MarkdownPad but with the ability to write an exporter for BBCode.

I&#x27;m quite happy with VS Code and this Markdown CSS theme:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mahonnaise&#x2F;vs-code-markdown-theme" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mahonnaise&#x2F;vs-code-markdown-theme</a><p>The automatic table formatting was pretty cool though (even if it&#x27;s purely cosmetic).

What exactly makes this any better than MacDown (OSX), and Markdown Pad 2 (Windows)? Both have side live preview, and accomplish pretty much everything. There could be some QOL improements in them, but I don&#x27;t see how caret.io is much better.

What Markdown is lacking, in my opinion, is a standard that was curated by the community.

I can highly recommend ReText. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;retext-project&#x2F;retext" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;retext-project&#x2F;retext</a>

Guess we can&#x27;t keep waiting for the vaporware that is Mou 1.0.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trymarkdown.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trymarkdown.com</a><p>* Live preview<p>* Saves content in LocalStorage so it can persist closing the browser

It&#x27;s really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they even cost money!<p>Really bizarre.

The only feature I think is actually pretty useful is the autocomplete of the title underlines.

Is this free?