Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

Shameless plug: I worked on a similar tool mdocs [1]. The main difference is that is opensource, it supports authentication and authorization [2] similar to Google Docs. The authorization part allows you to share documents at company level.<p>It is a 100% client-side application, it uses Firebase as backend and Auth0 for authentication.<p>[1] <a href="https://auth0.github.io/mdocs2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;auth0.github.io&#x2F;mdocs2</a><p>[2] <a href="https://dl.dropbox.com/s/w6bmji4t698v8qn/ss-2015-03-25T10-40-32.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;w6bmji4t698v8qn&#x2F;ss-2015-03-25T10-40...</a>

Collaborative editing is great, and I wonder if this project could be adapted as some sort of browser extension that would allow teams to collaboratively edit on pages that don&#x27;t otherwise support it.<p>For instance, the project-management software my team currently uses does not allow us to collaboratively edit tickets. Sometimes we&#x27;ve resorted to writing tickets together in Google Docs and then transferring the text back into the project-management tool. It would be awesome if we could use Fiddle.md or a similar tool right there on the page, rather than having to transfer text between tabs.

Would be nice if the tab key inserted a tab instead of jumping to the next field (for writing code, etc).

.md is the ccTLD for my country (Moldova), which got me excited and confused for a bit - was trying to find the connection with music in Eastern Europe. I&#x27;m not sure how to feel about such ccTLD abuse and conflating TLDs with file extensions in general.

I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are:<p>- Allow custom CSS<p>- Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL<p>Do you plan to open source it?

Got it working with on-the-fly yUML diagrams.<p>Example:<p><a href="http://fiddle.md/c74bgs3vthgqm8mtt9kx3z" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fiddle.md&#x2F;c74bgs3vthgqm8mtt9kx3z</a><p>Not perfect, but wouldn&#x27;t take much to make it play nicely?

I&#x27;m confused how this is collaborative. If a friend sends me a fiddle.md link and I change the content of the document, how do they become aware of my changes? Do I send them my link back?

As an academic that writes in Markdown (usually solo, offline), this ticks so many boxes for me. I love that for once I may be able to convince my co-authors to collaborate in Markdown instead of Google Docs. Integration with Dropbox is crucial to accomplish this (most academics use Dropbox), but it is missing one step: IMPORT!<p>It&#x27;s great to see that I can export to Dropbox, but then how do I roundtrip? Rather than remembering the URL (or copy and pasting from a desktop app), it would be great to be able to load up an existing document from Dropbox, send off a collaboration link, and then have the ability to send the completed (collaboratively written) text back to Dropbox.

As soon as the content is over a page long, the &quot;preview&quot; doesn&#x27;t really work, since what is supposed to be previewed is out of bounds.<p>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.<p>It didn&#x27;t take off (at all) so I let it go, but I wish there would be a standardized way to do this.<p>Other than that, great tool! Thanks for sharing.

The only thing that prevents me from using this that I can&#x27;t make an account to save my documents, and I can&#x27;t get that url bar to go away. The giant bar that says &quot;fiddle.md&#x2F;b836w36wh2h8mv3fj23t8r&#x2F;edit&quot; even though I can already see the link in my own URL bar. If there were a way to remove that I might use this. Looks great though!

Looks just like a bit more polished version of Socrates[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://socrates.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socrates.io&#x2F;</a>

What about user accounts where we can keep track of Fiddles, so we can organize them with tags and categories?

I love MD support, it makes writing things easy and looks polished, therefore I love this!<p>On top of that I believe It&#x27;s going to make it onto swipe.to ? I hope so because it would be a a much needed addition tool for editing presentations and rendering it on the fly :D

These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

I&#x27;ve played a bit and it looks really interesting.<p>I see you currently support saving the fiddles to dropbox. Do you plan to add other storage systems?<p>I&#x27;m thinking it would be great to use that along with github to write documentation or even websites using jekyll.

Looks interesting... Dark theme?

I love the syntax helper in the bottom. I&#x27;ve added markdown to a few projects and usually, I just added a help text summary near the input to remind users of the syntax; this is a much better solution.

Really like the design, especially the search&#x2F;menu box. It would be very nice to add proper support for tabs, especially when inserting larger blocks of code.

I&#x27;m a fan of this - elegant and simple way to make markdown more accessible to those who would otherwise shy away from it&#x27;s learning curve

Very nice! I love how easy you have made it to start a new fiddle, eliminating the signup. I&#x27;m all in for less signup walls on the internet!

Is it a feature or a bug that the page&#x27;s title tag also toggles when you toggle the preview&#x2F;html button?

&gt; Over Quota &gt; This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

@ggordan : is it using etherpad api for backend ?