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Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor
- saratv 7y agoCool. Perhaps add revisions too to avoid losing all work when shared.
- jakobitz 7y agoGood idea, I will look at adding revisions. Thanks for your comments
- thecodrr 7y agoThis is going to be very useful! Keep it up. I will be using this on and off so how can I contact you in case of bugs? Is this open source?
- jakobitz 7y agoGreat! You can contact me at me [at] jakebown.com for bugs. The editor is open source and uses editormd.
- antman 7y agoLooks great, perhaps add a preview button instead of editing the url? Hard for mobile users.
- ggambetta 7y agoDoes it support a 400k* word text file without slowing down to a crawl (i.e. a 5-10 second lag between a keypress and a change)? I've tried many markdown editors for my novel, and sadly most editors fail this very basic test :( * Edit: I misread the output of wc. The novel is ~70k words, ~400k characters. Leaving the 400k figure above because of the discussion that follows, because it should still be a reasonable use case, and because it makes even more surprising that most editors fail this even more basic test.
- t0astbread 7y agoIs a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?
- ggambetta 7y agoNo, the "very basic test" is not having a 10 second latency in a text editor. Come on, this was a solved problem in the 90s.
- t0astbread 7y agoIf it was a solved problem in the 90s, can't you just use a text editor from the 90s? No need to bash on this project just because it doesn't fulfill your use case.
- ggambetta 7y agoBecause there's contemporary Markdown editors that do work as expected. I didn't bash this one, I asked.
- z3t4 7y agoWhat editor did you end up with? Modern editors are fairly complex. Splitting a bitbuffer and showing ascii line by line is simple. But modern editors have to deal with unicode, where some characters (surrogates) are two chars long, and can be followed by modifiers such as skin color of emojis. Then some characters are wider then others. So a modern editor must first parse the string encoding, then parse the language (markdown) for further formatting and coloring or building a WYSIWYG, usually on every key stroke. The expensive part is showing the text on the screen, generating the fonts, where old editors didnt have fonts.
- ggambetta 7y agoI'm using Typora, which works pretty well for this use case. Open source, cross-platform, very nice. I'm in no way affiliated with it, I just like it :) I get the parsing difficulties. Generally, at least for markdown, pressing a character should affect only the line (paragraph) that contains it, so worst case scenario, you need to parse the entire paragraph. Worst case scenario, you need to re-render whatever fits on the screen. I refuse to believe it's not possible to do this efficiently with 2020 hardware, and I have proof, in the form of editors that work. If it's 2020, I try to append a character to a 400k file I have open, and this takes multiple seconds, it's because someone implemented Schlemiel the Painter's Algorithm, not because the hardware is slow or the file is too big.
- t0astbread 7y agoIn the File dropdown the "Toggle Preview" and "Toggle Editor" buttons seem to be swapped but otherwise this looks pretty cool!
- eipi-1 7y agoI use a self-hosted HackMD (now CodiMD) [1] instance for this. The hosted version pushes more and more towards account creation but you can start without account by visiting [2] directly. They have real time collaboration and a long list of additional plugins [3] that allow all kinds of nice collaboration use cases. For example it is possible to convert some bullet points into a presentation with minimal effort. What does Write.md provide compared to HackMD? Not affiliated with HackMD, just a happy user and always curious about alternatives. [1] https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd [2] https://hackmd.io/new https://hackmd.io/new [3] https://hackmd.io/features https://hackmd.io/features
- Freak_NL 7y agoWe self-host CodiMD as well. It's great for collaborative technical writing, such as software analysis and design specs. It lets the developers just use Markdown, which is really great when dealing with code samples (triple-backtick blocks!). WriteMD doesn't look like it can compete with CodiMD, which is free software and can be hosted locally — two huge advantages. Perhaps it'll improve though. Always good to know of alternatives.
- gramakri 7y agoTry this repo instead - https://github.com/codimd/server https://github.com/codimd/server . For those wondering about the conflicting repo names, we wrote a blog about it a while ago at https://cloudron.io/blog/2020-01-07-opensource-alternatives-to-google-docs.html https://cloudron.io/blog/2020-01-07-opensource-alternatives-... (see the codimd section)
- oefrha 7y agoQuestion if I may: which one would you recommend, the HackMD version or the community fork, and why? Both seem to be actively maintained and interfaces look close enough (other than template buttons and nudges towards signing in upon opening a new document in the company version).
- notRobot 7y agoVery similar webapp that I use: https://markdown.pioul.fr/ https://markdown.pioul.fr/ Extensions also available for major browsers.
- sandGorgon 7y agois there something similar for AsciiDoc ? AsciiDoc is a standardized format that's just as simple as MD. But far more features. Have been looking for something that lets us author asciidoc documents, but markdown (with varying standards) seems far more popular. some of these end up as not being Github compatible or whatever. FYI - asciidoc (.adoc) files are rendered by Github. https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/blob/master/README.adoc https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/blob/master/READM...
- GordonS 7y agoI like AsciiDocFx, and have used it for editing quite large AsciiDoc files. The preview function works really well too - highly recommended it! https://asciidocfx.com https://asciidocfx.com
- type0 7y agoDoesn't seem to be the case, unless you want to run something based on vscode online which could work.
- laurent123456 7y agoSomething's off with scrolling. If I scroll the editor, the viewer seems to follow but actually it's not in sync. For example, I can see the two bottom sections in the editor ("What is markdown", etc.), but they aren't yet visible in the viewer. Once I reach the bottom of the editor, the viewer suddenly jumps to the bottom.
- tomerbd 7y agoGreat! Needed such a tiny markdown editor and shareable also UX wise looks great.
- ollo 7y agoI've been using https://stackedit.io/ https://stackedit.io/. They look very similar.
- gravitas 7y agoDillinger is my online Markdown editor of choice, having a look between the two it's far beyond this solution in features. https://dillinger.io/ https://dillinger.io/ https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger
- avhon1 7y agoDoes Dillinger support collaborative editing (like Google Docs)? I feel like that is major feature of the parent product.
- nickriebe 7y agoGreat job. Would be nice if it could handle basic HTML (<ul><li><sup>)
- privatemonkey 7y agoHi, looks good. I'm curious about the inline variables and mustache template syntax. Haven't seen them in any other markdown dialect. Anyone else using them?
- jakobitz 7y agoThanks, I'm extending the editor to be more useful from a number of use cases I've spoken with users about. The variables and handle bars extend the markdown capabilities and looking to add more features. Let me know if your have any in mind and I will add it to our list!