15 ms·

Mark Text: Simple and Elegant Markdown Editor Focused on Speed and Usability

206 points by severine 7y ago

computerex 7y ago
Site looks like a disaster on mobile.
camillomiller 7y ago
The website is broken for me on mobile (iPhone 11 Pro Max).
jitl 7y ago
This website look pretty broken in my mobile browser.
- burlesona 7y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. Sorry to be “that guy” but it’s really hard for me to have any positive thoughts of a front-end web project when it’s website doesn’t work on mobile.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    Came here to say the same, glad I'm not the only one. The website is unusable on mobile so I can't even check out if the app is any good. I guess I know enough already.
    - RMPR 7y ago
      FWIW I looked the github page instead which renders nicely
      - DHPersonal 7y ago
        https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
        alias_neo 7y ago
        Thanks, turns out it looks pretty cool and I'll actually try it, from the experience with the website I was ready to forget about it and move on.
    - curiousgal 7y ago
      You couldn't just tick the "Request desktop site" box available in every browser? But yeah I guess you know enough already, the dev should apologize because the website of their free product is not mobile friendly.
      - alias_neo 7y ago
        I'm also a developer, and if you're not mobile-first let alone mobile friendly, you're doing it wrong in 2019. Why do I want to pan and scroll around a tiny site rendered in desktop mode on my mobile for your brand new product? It's either lazy or ignorant and neither gives me confidence in their software.
        curiousgal 7y ago
        It's a free product.
      - ubercow13 7y ago
        Doesn’t make any difference, it looks the same.
  - oauea 7y ago
    Were you planning to run this markdown editor on your phone?
    - iscrewyou 7y ago
      Not op, but there are markdown editors for phones now. And the website? Can’t even tell which OS the app is selling for.
      - DHPersonal 7y ago
        Windows, Mac, and Linux. https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
      - oauea 7y ago
        Not sure how you missed it, but it's extremely clear: https://i.imgur.com/0WL8XNE.png https://i.imgur.com/0WL8XNE.png Not affiliated with this product, just surprised at how this could possibly be unclear.
        pwinnski 7y ago
        Not so clear on a mobile device: https://i.imgur.com/LD5yMab.jpg https://i.imgur.com/LD5yMab.jpg Not affiliated with the OP, just surprised how a sub-thread about a broken mobile experience could possibly be unclear. ;)
    - austhrow743 7y ago
      This comment makes no sense. I don't plan to fly to Japan on my phone but I still want flight booking sites to work on it. Reading about an activity and doing the activity are two different things yeah?
  - DHPersonal 7y ago
    I don't know the motive for the site design, but I wonder if perhaps it wasn't coded for mobile because the app is not compatible with mobile devices but rather only Windows, Mac, and Linux. https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
    - gatherhunterer 7y ago
      Even if you’re making a CLI application the website still needs to work on mobile. Responsive design is the only web interface design that is relevant.
wpietri 7y ago
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.
stanski 7y ago
Can anything running on Electron be classified as simple? Just saying. (yes, I am that guy in this case) I like the idea behind it though.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I think that this argument is, frankly, over. Electron is the way to build cross-platform apps that don't merit separate UI code for each platform. Electron wins because Electron apps are able to deliver consistently decent UX, something that never happened with Swing or GTK+ or WxWidgets or whatever. Sure, it eats RAM. It turns out that I care about that so much less than I thought I would. I'm rarely using 100% of my system's RAM these days, so I'm willing to burn a couple hundred MB on widgets continuing to be sensibly drawn and laid out when I resize the window.
  - stanski 7y ago
    I think you're thinking of a different argument. I never said it doesn't provide consistent UX. It's just that when I hear a "simple markdown editor", I don't envision an app with a bundled web browser. I'm sure it looks great and all that.
    - mumblemumble 7y ago
      When they say "simple markdown editor", they're pretty obviously not talking about implementation details. They're talking about it being easy to use. As far as the argument goes, I'm not sure they're really separable. If you have an Electron app that markets itself as being simple (as in "easy to use"), and someone says, "No it isn't, because the stack it's built on is complex", their unstated major premise is that implementation details are more important than UI. Leaving it unstated doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed head-on. One of a syllogism's legs can easily be both tacit and the crux of the argument at the same time.
  - ComputerGuru 7y ago
    Text editors don’t need all the widgets and controls. They basically need a context menu (and Electron’s menus are horrible as they provide none of the native OS accelerators and integrations), a open/save dialog (pretty please don’t use a custom UI here!), and maybe a menu/toolbar. The editor itself is custom code (whether html/css/js or native), and that’s where the performance benefits of native code shine best anyway.
svat 7y ago
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. Before seeing this just now, Typora (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977) 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 (https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine) 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”. Are there any other editors like this?
- RMPR 7y ago
  Yeah totally agree I found typora very standing out between all markdown editors because of that feature.
- Hoasi 7y ago
  > The important feature worth mentioning is that it directly renders the Markdown, giving a WYSIWYG feel while still being backed by a plain-text (markdown) Exactly. It has a little bit of an IA Writer feel except that you no longer need a preview window thanks to this feature.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  Dropbox Paper works similarly.
- psweber 7y ago
  https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ does it pretty well. They use a proprietary library and don't allow local folders of text files, though...
  - 7y ago
bobcostas55 7y ago
I switch between this and Zettlr, they each have their small annoyances depending on what you're doing.
- Hoasi 7y ago
  Tried Zettlr, but couldn't get it to work.
RMPR 7y ago
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.
- RMPR 7y ago
  When I say "preview" I also include WYSIWYG style.
- infinitezest 7y ago
  Came here to say this, particularly RE: vim key binds. If those were added, I'd be much more interested. Even without the binds, though, I think it feels pretty good to use.
hoistbypetard 7y ago
I'm surprised by how much I like this idea. (I have not tried it yet.) 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.
- keithnz 7y ago
  I tend to use VSCode for markdown as it gives a preview, though I also use Vim for it as well. I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in Markdown these days. Including my own notes. I tried this Markdown editor. But very quickly decided I didn't like it, I felt handicapped not seeing the markdown and losing Vim bindings. But partly it's because I don't actually really need the visualization of markdown. I'm happy looking at the raw syntax of highlighted markdown. In Vscode I'll open the preview just to check I haven't done something silly. Also, the rendering of markdown in VsCode seems nicer ( perhaps more familiar )
  - hoistbypetard 7y ago
    > I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in Markdown these days. Including my own notes. Same here. And the preview, particularly of inline images, is what I like about VSCode for it. The main thing I like about this editor after trying it out for a little while today is the table stuff. For some reason that doesn't work as well for me in raw syntax as the rest. I think my ideal markdown editor would basically be the VSCode plugin's auto-suggestion of bullet syntax, the ability to paste images inline and have them land in a specified directory with a predictable path, and a good table editor. This one does a good job with the tables IMO. I haven't tried it much with images because that didn't really come up today.
windsurfer 7y ago
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? 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. 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): https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4 https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4 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 - ?? 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? This editor does not seem ready yet.
- eddyg 7y ago
  > I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock. The "right" way to do this is right-click on the application, and choose "Open". This allows a one-time bypass on a per-application basis.
  - windsurfer 7y ago
    Interesting. I didn't know that using "Open" was any different than double clicking. Thanks for the tip.
    - mbreese 7y ago
      I think the theory is that when the user right-click and select “open”, this is more of a conscious choice. Because of this extra effort, you get the option to go around the default security. I find this to be a good trade off between running any unsigned binary and complete lockdown. It’s enough of a barrier to make you stop and think, but doesn’t take too much effort to get past.
rock_artist 7y ago
I've tried looking the website on my iPhone SE with Firefox. Sadly the website isn't responsive at least on my phone.
tenkabuto 7y ago
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 so much for being/getting organized.
RMPR 7y ago
At least for installation on another distribution it doesn't suggest you to install apt-get. http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/ http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/
cryo 7y ago
12.3K stars on Github; over 1.300 commits; 197K downloads. 0 supporters on Patreon That's the sad reality for open source devs.
- cawlin 7y ago
  They do have 15 open collective sponsors.
- dingus 7y ago
  The tiers are $50/$100/$500 a month with a goal of $5000 per month to spend half of his free time on development. For a markdown editor? I see most Patreons with tiers around $3/$5/$20, and those are actually complex/ambitious.
  - epicide 7y ago
    Yeah, those are definitely some weird tiers. The beauty of these services is that I can toss a couple bucks a month to projects that I use. I don't want my name in credits, I don't want a dinner with the author, I don't want sneak preview access to whatever. I just want an easy way to support something that brings me value. Not even my total monthly contributions hit $50.
ausjke 7y ago
seems better than typora though I miss the file-system-layout on the left side when I have a lot of md files. 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 bold the editor will auto match to be bold which is nice, but I still have to move my keys to skip the two 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.
jmfayard 7y ago
This looks really nice... ... except like every other apps around there it only supports Markdown Feature request: Please add an option to convert the resulting file to a better format like Asciidoc and other better markup formats Maybe using pandoc. WHY? I feel unwell with Markdown Markdown deserve credits for having found a real important problem to solve on the other hand, it's not a good solution to that problem ... but just good enough that its bad aspects are not obvious Combined with its current popularity, this makes progress very hard But there are so much things that are wrong with Markdown. Nested lists? I get them wrong every time. Images syntax is bad. Tables syntax is worse. No table of contents. You can't have variables. You can't include another file. In the end, every website does its own markdown because Markdown sucks. Interopability? Ah ah. Some have tried. That's a rabbit hole to get into. In the end, Markdown is just a starting point... To a real format like Asciidoc.
- bhl 7y ago
  Do you have a suggested improved syntax for images and tables? I think Table of Contents exist in some implementations of Markdown but it’s not common.
  - jmfayard 7y ago
    Yes I have! I am gradually switching to Asciidoctor because it solved all the pain points I cited (and more) > Table of contents That's simply :toc: > Images Doing better is easy, plain HTML is better than Markdown. For example: image::sunset.jpg[] or [link=https://www.flickr.com/photos/javh/5448336655 https://www.flickr.com/photos/javh/5448336655] image::sunset.jpg[Sunset,300,200] or Click image:icons/play.png[Play, title="Play"] to get the party started. https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#images https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#images > Tables See https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables
- alias_neo 7y ago
  What I need is something that let's me write my docs in markdown and then quickly and easily render them to PDF with nice output, runs on Linux, and doesn't render remotely. I've used Grip, and I use the Markdown to PDF plugin in VSCodium but none of these really meet the requirements.
ryanianian 7y ago
The inline MathJax editor with live-preview is nice, as is proper markdown parsing (you can put code-blocks inside lists! gives side-eye to Bear.app). And it's got a pleasing stylesheet. But I don't really see what this brings to the table to be honest. 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. 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. 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.
deleted 7y ago
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stephenr 7y ago
This website is completely unusable on mobile. It’s worse than a pre-smartphone site because it disabled zoom out so the content is just cut off.
0x1d4e 7y ago
I’m currently using Vnote https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/ https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/ 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.
- gexla 7y ago
  This looks promising! Downloading now. Thanks for pointing it out!
greggman2 7y ago
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.
- greggman2 7y ago
  Downloaded. This one fails like most do. Sigh...
- gexla 7y ago
  That wouldn't be Markdown though? A better question might be, what flavor of Markdown serves your purposes? Find this, and then look for an editor which supports it. Adding anything non-standard would be creating a new flavor of Markdown. I want for all the features I use in an editor to be fully portable. If it's not standard, then it's not portable. NOTE: In this case, by Standard, I mean widely used. I get what you are saying though. You want the full versatility of HTML at some point. My method of dealing with this is to come up with a set of scripts which converts snippets and turns the doc into HTML. The Markdown file would be the source and the HTML would be the view layer. The scripts are a build process. Of course, this takes time which not everyone has. It's impossible to cover the use cases for everyone though. And I find so often that when I get a feature I think I can't live without, it still falls short because I didn't think through my problem well enough. Otherwise, it might be best just to use HTML from the start. Or you could ditch Markdown and try Asciidoctor. The issue there is that you're limiting your editor options. https://asciidoctor.org/ https://asciidoctor.org/
  - greggman2 7y ago
    html has always been a part of markdown. It says right in the original spec > Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text. > For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags. and > Span-level HTML tags — e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> — can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html The entire point is just to make most of the document easy to read. Not to replace nor forbid html.
awill 7y ago
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. 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. If I could buy a high quality markdown editor on Linux that rivaled Ulysses I would.
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  Isn’t Typora electron too? Or is their Linux version a native app?
  - gexla 7y ago
    Yes
  - awill 7y ago
    It is. But I spend more time at work using a Mac. I would rather use the best app for the OS. On Linux, there isn't anything as good as Ulysses.
geoelectric 7y ago
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: First, "-", "+" and "*" are all legal bullet characters for creating unordered lists. 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. 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. 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. So, "+<TAB>New Task" eventually becomes "+<SPACE>^<TAB>New Task" to indicate it's been tracked, for a final render of "o ^ New Task" 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. This editor won't even let you input a tab character. Tab always indents, whether it's opt-Tab, ctrl-Tab, or what. 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.
rehasu 7y ago
What does it do better than the oldest simple and elegant markdown editor, vim?
mihaela 7y ago
Nooo, another Electron "app"
yellowapple 7y ago
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". Like, what gives? Why restrict this? It obviously ain't an Electron limitation, since plenty of other Electron apps support my fonts just fine.
- jocs 7y ago
  This new version 0.16.0 will support more fonts, and will be released in the middle of this month.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Does "more fonts" mean "any font installed on my system"? Or does it mean "a bigger hardcoded list of fonts"? If the latter, will that list include Computer Modern?
crispinb 7y ago
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.
jocs 7y ago
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 https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext. Thank you everyone.
- lytefm 7y ago
  I appreciate Mark Text a lot, have been switching from Typora at the beginning of the year. I'm taking all my notes with it and find features like KaTeX and Mermaid very useful. Some remarks and questions from my side: - How is the current status the Plugin system? It would be cool to try integrating features like Pandoc Citer from VSCode or LaTeX autocompletion, but I guess that would be too much for the core. - Since you're already using pandoc, more available export formats or the option to define own exports via settings would be useful! - Images are linked to their current path when added. I liked Typora's feature of automatically copying them into an asset folder a lot. Overall, great work! I might learn Vue an Electron just for the sake of MarkText. Don't listen to the Electron critics - having a reusable rendering engine and the same features as in GitLab available locally is way better than saving some RAM.

206 points by severine 7y ago

computerex 7y ago

Site looks like a disaster on mobile.

camillomiller 7y ago

The website is broken for me on mobile (iPhone 11 Pro Max).

jitl 7y ago

This website look pretty broken in my mobile browser.

burlesona 7y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Sorry to be “that guy” but it’s really hard for me to have any positive thoughts of a front-end web project when it’s website doesn’t work on mobile.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  Came here to say the same, glad I'm not the only one. The website is unusable on mobile so I can't even check out if the app is any good. I guess I know enough already.
  - RMPR 7y ago
    FWIW I looked the github page instead which renders nicely
    - DHPersonal 7y ago
      https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
      - alias_neo 7y ago
        Thanks, turns out it looks pretty cool and I'll actually try it, from the experience with the website I was ready to forget about it and move on.
  - curiousgal 7y ago
    You couldn't just tick the "Request desktop site" box available in every browser? But yeah I guess you know enough already, the dev should apologize because the website of their free product is not mobile friendly.
    - alias_neo 7y ago
      I'm also a developer, and if you're not mobile-first let alone mobile friendly, you're doing it wrong in 2019. Why do I want to pan and scroll around a tiny site rendered in desktop mode on my mobile for your brand new product? It's either lazy or ignorant and neither gives me confidence in their software.
      - curiousgal 7y ago
        It's a free product.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      Doesn’t make any difference, it looks the same.
- oauea 7y ago
  Were you planning to run this markdown editor on your phone?
  - iscrewyou 7y ago
    Not op, but there are markdown editors for phones now. And the website? Can’t even tell which OS the app is selling for.
    - DHPersonal 7y ago
      Windows, Mac, and Linux. https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
    - oauea 7y ago
      Not sure how you missed it, but it's extremely clear: https://i.imgur.com/0WL8XNE.png https://i.imgur.com/0WL8XNE.png Not affiliated with this product, just surprised at how this could possibly be unclear.
      - pwinnski 7y ago
        Not so clear on a mobile device: https://i.imgur.com/LD5yMab.jpg https://i.imgur.com/LD5yMab.jpg Not affiliated with the OP, just surprised how a sub-thread about a broken mobile experience could possibly be unclear. ;)
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    This comment makes no sense. I don't plan to fly to Japan on my phone but I still want flight booking sites to work on it. Reading about an activity and doing the activity are two different things yeah?
- DHPersonal 7y ago
  I don't know the motive for the site design, but I wonder if perhaps it wasn't coded for mobile because the app is not compatible with mobile devices but rather only Windows, Mac, and Linux. https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext
  - gatherhunterer 7y ago
    Even if you’re making a CLI application the website still needs to work on mobile. Responsive design is the only web interface design that is relevant.

wpietri 7y ago

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.

stanski 7y ago

Can anything running on Electron be classified as simple? Just saying. (yes, I am that guy in this case) I like the idea behind it though.

mumblemumble 7y ago
I think that this argument is, frankly, over. Electron is the way to build cross-platform apps that don't merit separate UI code for each platform. Electron wins because Electron apps are able to deliver consistently decent UX, something that never happened with Swing or GTK+ or WxWidgets or whatever. Sure, it eats RAM. It turns out that I care about that so much less than I thought I would. I'm rarely using 100% of my system's RAM these days, so I'm willing to burn a couple hundred MB on widgets continuing to be sensibly drawn and laid out when I resize the window.
- stanski 7y ago
  I think you're thinking of a different argument. I never said it doesn't provide consistent UX. It's just that when I hear a "simple markdown editor", I don't envision an app with a bundled web browser. I'm sure it looks great and all that.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    When they say "simple markdown editor", they're pretty obviously not talking about implementation details. They're talking about it being easy to use. As far as the argument goes, I'm not sure they're really separable. If you have an Electron app that markets itself as being simple (as in "easy to use"), and someone says, "No it isn't, because the stack it's built on is complex", their unstated major premise is that implementation details are more important than UI. Leaving it unstated doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed head-on. One of a syllogism's legs can easily be both tacit and the crux of the argument at the same time.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  Text editors don’t need all the widgets and controls. They basically need a context menu (and Electron’s menus are horrible as they provide none of the native OS accelerators and integrations), a open/save dialog (pretty please don’t use a custom UI here!), and maybe a menu/toolbar. The editor itself is custom code (whether html/css/js or native), and that’s where the performance benefits of native code shine best anyway.

svat 7y ago

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. Before seeing this just now, Typora (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21458977) 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 (https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine https://github.com/brrd/Abricotine) 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”. Are there any other editors like this?

RMPR 7y ago
Yeah totally agree I found typora very standing out between all markdown editors because of that feature.
Hoasi 7y ago
> The important feature worth mentioning is that it directly renders the Markdown, giving a WYSIWYG feel while still being backed by a plain-text (markdown) Exactly. It has a little bit of an IA Writer feel except that you no longer need a preview window thanks to this feature.
skrebbel 7y ago
Dropbox Paper works similarly.
psweber 7y ago
https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ does it pretty well. They use a proprietary library and don't allow local folders of text files, though...
- 7y ago

bobcostas55 7y ago

I switch between this and Zettlr, they each have their small annoyances depending on what you're doing.

Hoasi 7y ago
Tried Zettlr, but couldn't get it to work.

RMPR 7y ago

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.

RMPR 7y ago
When I say "preview" I also include WYSIWYG style.
infinitezest 7y ago
Came here to say this, particularly RE: vim key binds. If those were added, I'd be much more interested. Even without the binds, though, I think it feels pretty good to use.

hoistbypetard 7y ago

I'm surprised by how much I like this idea. (I have not tried it yet.) 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.

keithnz 7y ago
I tend to use VSCode for markdown as it gives a preview, though I also use Vim for it as well. I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in Markdown these days. Including my own notes. I tried this Markdown editor. But very quickly decided I didn't like it, I felt handicapped not seeing the markdown and losing Vim bindings. But partly it's because I don't actually really need the visualization of markdown. I'm happy looking at the raw syntax of highlighted markdown. In Vscode I'll open the preview just to check I haven't done something silly. Also, the rendering of markdown in VsCode seems nicer ( perhaps more familiar )
- hoistbypetard 7y ago
  > I pretty much exclusively write any kind of documentation in Markdown these days. Including my own notes. Same here. And the preview, particularly of inline images, is what I like about VSCode for it. The main thing I like about this editor after trying it out for a little while today is the table stuff. For some reason that doesn't work as well for me in raw syntax as the rest. I think my ideal markdown editor would basically be the VSCode plugin's auto-suggestion of bullet syntax, the ability to paste images inline and have them land in a specified directory with a predictable path, and a good table editor. This one does a good job with the tables IMO. I haven't tried it much with images because that didn't really come up today.

windsurfer 7y ago

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? 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. 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): https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4 https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4 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 - ?? 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? This editor does not seem ready yet.

eddyg 7y ago
> I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock. The "right" way to do this is right-click on the application, and choose "Open". This allows a one-time bypass on a per-application basis.
- windsurfer 7y ago
  Interesting. I didn't know that using "Open" was any different than double clicking. Thanks for the tip.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    I think the theory is that when the user right-click and select “open”, this is more of a conscious choice. Because of this extra effort, you get the option to go around the default security. I find this to be a good trade off between running any unsigned binary and complete lockdown. It’s enough of a barrier to make you stop and think, but doesn’t take too much effort to get past.

rock_artist 7y ago

I've tried looking the website on my iPhone SE with Firefox. Sadly the website isn't responsive at least on my phone.

tenkabuto 7y ago

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 so much for being/getting organized.

RMPR 7y ago

At least for installation on another distribution it doesn't suggest you to install apt-get. http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/ http://support.typora.io/Typora-on-Linux/

cryo 7y ago

12.3K stars on Github; over 1.300 commits; 197K downloads. 0 supporters on Patreon That's the sad reality for open source devs.

cawlin 7y ago
They do have 15 open collective sponsors.
dingus 7y ago
The tiers are $50/$100/$500 a month with a goal of $5000 per month to spend half of his free time on development. For a markdown editor? I see most Patreons with tiers around $3/$5/$20, and those are actually complex/ambitious.
- epicide 7y ago
  Yeah, those are definitely some weird tiers. The beauty of these services is that I can toss a couple bucks a month to projects that I use. I don't want my name in credits, I don't want a dinner with the author, I don't want sneak preview access to whatever. I just want an easy way to support something that brings me value. Not even my total monthly contributions hit $50.

ausjke 7y ago

seems better than typora though I miss the file-system-layout on the left side when I have a lot of md files. 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 bold the editor will auto match to be bold which is nice, but I still have to move my keys to skip the two 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.

jmfayard 7y ago

This looks really nice... ... except like every other apps around there it only supports Markdown Feature request: Please add an option to convert the resulting file to a better format like Asciidoc and other better markup formats Maybe using pandoc. WHY? I feel unwell with Markdown Markdown deserve credits for having found a real important problem to solve on the other hand, it's not a good solution to that problem ... but just good enough that its bad aspects are not obvious Combined with its current popularity, this makes progress very hard But there are so much things that are wrong with Markdown. Nested lists? I get them wrong every time. Images syntax is bad. Tables syntax is worse. No table of contents. You can't have variables. You can't include another file. In the end, every website does its own markdown because Markdown sucks. Interopability? Ah ah. Some have tried. That's a rabbit hole to get into. In the end, Markdown is just a starting point... To a real format like Asciidoc.

bhl 7y ago
Do you have a suggested improved syntax for images and tables? I think Table of Contents exist in some implementations of Markdown but it’s not common.
- jmfayard 7y ago
  Yes I have! I am gradually switching to Asciidoctor because it solved all the pain points I cited (and more) > Table of contents That's simply :toc: > Images Doing better is easy, plain HTML is better than Markdown. For example: image::sunset.jpg[] or [link=https://www.flickr.com/photos/javh/5448336655 https://www.flickr.com/photos/javh/5448336655] image::sunset.jpg[Sunset,300,200] or Click image:icons/play.png[Play, title="Play"] to get the party started. https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#images https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#images > Tables See https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables
alias_neo 7y ago
What I need is something that let's me write my docs in markdown and then quickly and easily render them to PDF with nice output, runs on Linux, and doesn't render remotely. I've used Grip, and I use the Markdown to PDF plugin in VSCodium but none of these really meet the requirements.

ryanianian 7y ago

The inline MathJax editor with live-preview is nice, as is proper markdown parsing (you can put code-blocks inside lists! gives side-eye to Bear.app). And it's got a pleasing stylesheet. But I don't really see what this brings to the table to be honest. 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. 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. 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stephenr 7y ago

This website is completely unusable on mobile. It’s worse than a pre-smartphone site because it disabled zoom out so the content is just cut off.

0x1d4e 7y ago

I’m currently using Vnote https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/ https://github.com/tamlok/vnote/ 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.

gexla 7y ago
This looks promising! Downloading now. Thanks for pointing it out!

greggman2 7y ago

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.

greggman2 7y ago
Downloaded. This one fails like most do. Sigh...
gexla 7y ago
That wouldn't be Markdown though? A better question might be, what flavor of Markdown serves your purposes? Find this, and then look for an editor which supports it. Adding anything non-standard would be creating a new flavor of Markdown. I want for all the features I use in an editor to be fully portable. If it's not standard, then it's not portable. NOTE: In this case, by Standard, I mean widely used. I get what you are saying though. You want the full versatility of HTML at some point. My method of dealing with this is to come up with a set of scripts which converts snippets and turns the doc into HTML. The Markdown file would be the source and the HTML would be the view layer. The scripts are a build process. Of course, this takes time which not everyone has. It's impossible to cover the use cases for everyone though. And I find so often that when I get a feature I think I can't live without, it still falls short because I didn't think through my problem well enough. Otherwise, it might be best just to use HTML from the start. Or you could ditch Markdown and try Asciidoctor. The issue there is that you're limiting your editor options. https://asciidoctor.org/ https://asciidoctor.org/
- greggman2 7y ago
  html has always been a part of markdown. It says right in the original spec > Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text. > For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags. and > Span-level HTML tags — e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> — can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html The entire point is just to make most of the document easy to read. Not to replace nor forbid html.

awill 7y ago

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. 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. If I could buy a high quality markdown editor on Linux that rivaled Ulysses I would.

Sendotsh 7y ago
Isn’t Typora electron too? Or is their Linux version a native app?
- gexla 7y ago
  Yes
- awill 7y ago
  It is. But I spend more time at work using a Mac. I would rather use the best app for the OS. On Linux, there isn't anything as good as Ulysses.

geoelectric 7y ago

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: First, "-", "+" and "*" are all legal bullet characters for creating unordered lists. 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. 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. 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. So, "+<TAB>New Task" eventually becomes "+<SPACE>^<TAB>New Task" to indicate it's been tracked, for a final render of "o ^ New Task" 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. This editor won't even let you input a tab character. Tab always indents, whether it's opt-Tab, ctrl-Tab, or what. 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.

rehasu 7y ago

What does it do better than the oldest simple and elegant markdown editor, vim?

mihaela 7y ago

Nooo, another Electron "app"

yellowapple 7y ago

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". Like, what gives? Why restrict this? It obviously ain't an Electron limitation, since plenty of other Electron apps support my fonts just fine.

jocs 7y ago
This new version 0.16.0 will support more fonts, and will be released in the middle of this month.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Does "more fonts" mean "any font installed on my system"? Or does it mean "a bigger hardcoded list of fonts"? If the latter, will that list include Computer Modern?

crispinb 7y ago

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.

jocs 7y ago

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 https://github.com/marktext/marktext https://github.com/marktext/marktext. Thank you everyone.

lytefm 7y ago
I appreciate Mark Text a lot, have been switching from Typora at the beginning of the year. I'm taking all my notes with it and find features like KaTeX and Mermaid very useful. Some remarks and questions from my side: - How is the current status the Plugin system? It would be cool to try integrating features like Pandoc Citer from VSCode or LaTeX autocompletion, but I guess that would be too much for the core. - Since you're already using pandoc, more available export formats or the option to define own exports via settings would be useful! - Images are linked to their current path when added. I liked Typora's feature of automatically copying them into an asset folder a lot. Overall, great work! I might learn Vue an Electron just for the sake of MarkText. Don't listen to the Electron critics - having a reusable rendering engine and the same features as in GitLab available locally is way better than saving some RAM.