9 ms·

Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

59 points by erusev 11y ago

softinio 11y ago
Is this free?
- erusev 11y ago
  The beta is free. The stable release is going to cost $10.
- aroch 11y ago
  There's a big "Preorder at $5" button...so after beta no
gamache 11y ago
Serious question: why is this not implemented a Vim/Sublime/Atom/Emacs plugin?
- Honzo 11y ago
  People writing in markdown aren't necessarily developers that want all the extra baggage. Atom already ships with a markdown preview pane as well.
  - stronglikedan 11y ago
    With the exception of Atom, aren't those all just text editors when not extended? (Another serious question; I don't know for sure.) If so, what would be the extra baggage beyond a markdown only editor?
thedaemon 11y ago
For Mac, not Desktop.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  Currently, but Windows and Linux are coming, according to the page.
  - organsnyder 11y ago
    Until they ship something, that promise is completely useless for users of those platforms.
sdegutis 11y ago
So, it shows your text as a hybrid of plain and rich text? Cool. I tried to write a similar app. But I couldn't find a rich-text-view API that didn't eat all my CPU all the time. OP: How did you manage to solve that issue? Or do you just ignore it and let the CPU go crazy?
thenomad 11y ago
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.
omegote 11y ago
Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time. 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.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  For me, the point of Markdown (and LaTeX for that matter) is that I can focus on just the writing, not what my document will look like.
  - atmosx 11y ago
    Really, you can focus on writing with LaTeX? Are we talking about paragraph after paragraph of text or scientific writing with images and formulas and code, because after writing my thesis in LaTeX my experience has been different. I've lost a huge amount of time trying to adjust images, debugging compilations errors, etc. Of course the document looks clean as it should and stands out from the rest, but still, I wasn't able to focus on writing, I had to always double-check for errors. VIM plugin for latex helped a great deal.
- 2bluesc 11y ago
  > Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview Atom has this with the "Markdown Preview" that pops-up with SHIFT + CTRL + M. It does most of what I want today, but still feels lacking.
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    I've also been using Mou for a good while that gives you a live preview as you edit: http://25.io/mou/ http://25.io/mou/
    - atmosx 11y ago
      I used Mou, VIM and MacDown in the past. Vim of course doesn't have a preview (sic), but both MacDown and Mou offer previews. http://macdown.uranusjr.com/ http://macdown.uranusjr.com/
anc84 11y ago
I can highly recommend ReText. https://github.com/retext-project/retext https://github.com/retext-project/retext
eugenekolo2 11y ago
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't see how caret.io is much better.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  Some of the shortcuts look better thought out in Caret (in particular the inline file browser), but mostly, it just looks slicker. For 5 bucks, I don't expect it to be "much better", just a little better.
ahoge 11y ago
I'm quite happy with VS Code and this Markdown CSS theme: https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme The automatic table formatting was pretty cool though (even if it's purely cosmetic).
louhike 11y ago
Too bad it is not based on CommonMark. They made a great effort to make a standard.
- erusev 11y ago
  We are moving in that direction. Please, consider that this is still a beta.
- HarshaThota 11y ago
  [Markdown Edit](http://markdownedit.com/ http://markdownedit.com/) for Windows has CommonMark support.
drew-y 11y ago
The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf export. It'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: https://github.com/dvcrn/markright https://github.com/dvcrn/markright
- erusev 11y ago
  We are working on PDF export - it's possible that it will be a part of the 1.0.
  - bradgessler 11y ago
    Any plans for front matter support?
- 127001brewer 11y ago
  Both of these like promising applications, but I've just been using the Atom IDE (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) with the "Markdown Preview" and "Markdown to PDF" packages.
  - drew-y 11y ago
    I use "Markdown Preview" as well. I couldn't get "Markdown to PDF" to properly apply the styling though.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  It'd be nice to have it be part of the editor, but `pandoc document.md -o document.pdf` does the trick. http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html
  - biggest_lou 11y ago
    That's fine for a single document, but definitely doesn't work for an entire directory structure worth of Markdown files
abritishguy 11y ago
The only feature I think is actually pretty useful is the autocomplete of the title underlines.
ballsohardy 11y ago
already a text editor with this name https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjciodhpcledpamjachpmelml https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjcio...
c0achmcguirk 11y ago
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]. 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. [1] - http://marked2app.com/ http://marked2app.com/ [2] - https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown
coherentpony 11y ago
What Markdown is lacking, in my opinion, is a standard that was curated by the community.
- kgrin 11y ago
  What about http://commonmark.org http://commonmark.org?
  - coherentpony 11y ago
    I like the spirit of that effort, but it has a checkered history; it was born out of input from a private working group without input from the community [1]. I'm fundamentally against this philosophy as an open source advocate. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/
stdbrouw 11y ago
Guess we can't keep waiting for the vaporware that is Mou 1.0.
- petepete 11y ago
  Will MacDown fit the bill for the time being? http://macdown.uranusjr.com/ http://macdown.uranusjr.com/
Bostwick 11y ago
I tried the application, and it looks great! One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don'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'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't keep live-preview open as I'm writing. The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.
- antback 11y ago
  Why is so important for you the wordcount feature? I don't get it.
  - masukomi 11y ago
    I'm with antback on this one. You write as many words as are needed to convey your message. Unless you are a journalist or a student, why does it matter? Also, if you're serious about word count and other metadata about your document then you should look into Marked 2. It's got that and much more.
ryanSrich 11y ago
Getting a 404 on `http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg` http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg` - Has anyone else been able to download this morning? I also pre-ordered.
smoovej 11y ago
I just want to say great job with this. Really really enjoying using it so far today. More than happy to preorder. Well done, looking forward to 2.0!
- erusev 11y ago
  Thanks, we put a lot of love (and effort) into it so it makes us very happy to hear this.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re almost all electron/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. 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.
fiatjaf 11y ago
It's really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they even cost money! Really bizarre.
bndw 11y ago
http://trymarkdown.com http://trymarkdown.com * Live preview * Saves content in LocalStorage so it can persist closing the browser

59 points by erusev 11y ago

softinio 11y ago

Is this free?

erusev 11y ago
The beta is free. The stable release is going to cost $10.
aroch 11y ago
There's a big "Preorder at $5" button...so after beta no

gamache 11y ago

Serious question: why is this not implemented a Vim/Sublime/Atom/Emacs plugin?

Honzo 11y ago
People writing in markdown aren't necessarily developers that want all the extra baggage. Atom already ships with a markdown preview pane as well.
- stronglikedan 11y ago
  With the exception of Atom, aren't those all just text editors when not extended? (Another serious question; I don't know for sure.) If so, what would be the extra baggage beyond a markdown only editor?

thedaemon 11y ago

For Mac, not Desktop.

bachmeier 11y ago
Currently, but Windows and Linux are coming, according to the page.
- organsnyder 11y ago
  Until they ship something, that promise is completely useless for users of those platforms.

sdegutis 11y ago

So, it shows your text as a hybrid of plain and rich text? Cool. I tried to write a similar app. But I couldn't find a rich-text-view API that didn't eat all my CPU all the time. OP: How did you manage to solve that issue? Or do you just ignore it and let the CPU go crazy?

thenomad 11y ago

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.

omegote 11y ago

Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time. 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.

stdbrouw 11y ago
For me, the point of Markdown (and LaTeX for that matter) is that I can focus on just the writing, not what my document will look like.
- atmosx 11y ago
  Really, you can focus on writing with LaTeX? Are we talking about paragraph after paragraph of text or scientific writing with images and formulas and code, because after writing my thesis in LaTeX my experience has been different. I've lost a huge amount of time trying to adjust images, debugging compilations errors, etc. Of course the document looks clean as it should and stands out from the rest, but still, I wasn't able to focus on writing, I had to always double-check for errors. VIM plugin for latex helped a great deal.
2bluesc 11y ago
> Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview Atom has this with the "Markdown Preview" that pops-up with SHIFT + CTRL + M. It does most of what I want today, but still feels lacking.
- res0nat0r 11y ago
  I've also been using Mou for a good while that gives you a live preview as you edit: http://25.io/mou/ http://25.io/mou/
  - atmosx 11y ago
    I used Mou, VIM and MacDown in the past. Vim of course doesn't have a preview (sic), but both MacDown and Mou offer previews. http://macdown.uranusjr.com/ http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

anc84 11y ago

I can highly recommend ReText. https://github.com/retext-project/retext https://github.com/retext-project/retext

eugenekolo2 11y ago

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't see how caret.io is much better.

stdbrouw 11y ago
Some of the shortcuts look better thought out in Caret (in particular the inline file browser), but mostly, it just looks slicker. For 5 bucks, I don't expect it to be "much better", just a little better.

ahoge 11y ago

I'm quite happy with VS Code and this Markdown CSS theme: https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme The automatic table formatting was pretty cool though (even if it's purely cosmetic).

louhike 11y ago

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

erusev 11y ago
We are moving in that direction. Please, consider that this is still a beta.
HarshaThota 11y ago
[Markdown Edit](http://markdownedit.com/ http://markdownedit.com/) for Windows has CommonMark support.

drew-y 11y ago

The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf export. It'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: https://github.com/dvcrn/markright https://github.com/dvcrn/markright

erusev 11y ago
We are working on PDF export - it's possible that it will be a part of the 1.0.
- bradgessler 11y ago
  Any plans for front matter support?
127001brewer 11y ago
Both of these like promising applications, but I've just been using the Atom IDE (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) with the "Markdown Preview" and "Markdown to PDF" packages.
- drew-y 11y ago
  I use "Markdown Preview" as well. I couldn't get "Markdown to PDF" to properly apply the styling though.
stdbrouw 11y ago
It'd be nice to have it be part of the editor, but `pandoc document.md -o document.pdf` does the trick. http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html
- biggest_lou 11y ago
  That's fine for a single document, but definitely doesn't work for an entire directory structure worth of Markdown files

abritishguy 11y ago

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

ballsohardy 11y ago

already a text editor with this name https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjciodhpcledpamjachpmelml https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjcio...

c0achmcguirk 11y ago

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]. 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. [1] - http://marked2app.com/ http://marked2app.com/ [2] - https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown

coherentpony 11y ago

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

kgrin 11y ago
What about http://commonmark.org http://commonmark.org?
- coherentpony 11y ago
  I like the spirit of that effort, but it has a checkered history; it was born out of input from a private working group without input from the community [1]. I'm fundamentally against this philosophy as an open source advocate. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/

stdbrouw 11y ago

Guess we can't keep waiting for the vaporware that is Mou 1.0.

petepete 11y ago
Will MacDown fit the bill for the time being? http://macdown.uranusjr.com/ http://macdown.uranusjr.com/

Bostwick 11y ago

I tried the application, and it looks great! One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I currently use) don'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'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't keep live-preview open as I'm writing. The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll YAML headers.

antback 11y ago
Why is so important for you the wordcount feature? I don't get it.
- masukomi 11y ago
  I'm with antback on this one. You write as many words as are needed to convey your message. Unless you are a journalist or a student, why does it matter? Also, if you're serious about word count and other metadata about your document then you should look into Marked 2. It's got that and much more.

ryanSrich 11y ago

Getting a 404 on `http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg` http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg` - Has anyone else been able to download this morning? I also pre-ordered.

smoovej 11y ago

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

erusev 11y ago
Thanks, we put a lot of love (and effort) into it so it makes us very happy to hear this.

kitsunesoba 11y ago

What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re almost all electron/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. 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.

fiatjaf 11y ago

It's really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they even cost money! Really bizarre.

bndw 11y ago

http://trymarkdown.com http://trymarkdown.com * Live preview * Saves content in LocalStorage so it can persist closing the browser