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Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim. Now what I'd be interested

Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim. Now what I'd be interested in seeing is an argument for traditional publishers or WordPress users to switch to this sort of stack.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
If there was a decent WYSIWYG editor (like Typora) bundled with Pandoc with a myriad of customizable export options, included with a bunch of high-quality themes and templates, while also having a one-click service to upload to a server for static serving, then I don’t see why not. Maybe the technology stack is not the problem, it’s the presentation of it that makes non-tech people gawk at the complexity. Though the biggest problem with this stack is that everything breaks down when you’re doing anything serious with images or layouting.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  I think the larger part of the problem is exactly what the author seems to miss: even using Jeykll is scary for non-technical users, let alone git. (Try getting your grandfather to restore his accidently deleted posts)
- scary-size 5y ago
  That's what I experienced building a static site generator for my dad. You would just dump markdown into a dropbox folder. A cron job would poll from dropbox and generate the website. But even markdown is too daunting for a non-techie. Non-technical users are probably not used to write "code"/"mark-up" and have a good grasp at what's coming out on the other side. The visual aspect, a sort of preview, is missing. There are a lot of options to preview markdown. That's just another hurdle, another tool they might have to learn. It's all just so loosely integrated, even I have a hard time putting it together. Might be fun for us to fiddle around, but it isn't if you just want to put your content out there. I've started to work on an alternative: Desktop app, with a block based editor (text, images, headings nothing more). Shows a local preview of your site. Outputs static assets and/or uploads directly to Vercel for hosting. Few knobs to fiddle around.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Why not a WYSIWYG HTML editor? At the end of the day Markdown is just an intermediary shorthand for the eventual output, originally HTML; and HTML is actually standardized. If you’re not going to use the Markdown syntax, then wouldn’t an HTML editor that hides all the HTML do the job?
    - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
      Actually, you’re right. The only thing people actually need is a good WYSIWYG editor; the format is probably uninteresting to the end user. Though there is a case to be made for using an open, well-documented format (whether it be Markdown or HTML or something else), since without this openness third-party developers would have trouble in developing and customizing their own exporters. Well, if you’re suggesting HTML (or XML) for that job, then maybe it’s time to resurrect XLST instead of using Pandoc… (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT)
    - scary-size 5y ago
      There would still be a lot of moving parts on the table. What to do with all these HTML files? How do I link them together? How do I get those files to a hosting provider? Where do I handle global styling? For the content creating itself a WYSIWYG editor would be fine, but there's more to the process. I'm also guilty of the builder mentality. It's just a fun project to work on and it benefits at least on other person :)
- trasz 5y ago
  How would content created with WYSIWYG editor work (and look decent) on any device other than it was created for, eg a phone?
matkoniecz 5y ago
I expect that for book writing content may be doable in markdown, but real book will require more advanced format. LaTeX? I am not going to argue against vim but I would argue against being forced or expected to use it.
- boris_m 5y ago
  You can have the content in markdown and then go through LaTeX for additional stuff (title page, headers and footers etc.)
eternityforest 5y ago
I don't think there is much of an argument. CMSes work and they do a ton of other stuff besides edit text that people want. And they can be cloud managed with no manual setup. Their black box point and click model is great for division of labor. Although, GitHub is a pretty great publishing platform for open source texts, but that's a whole platform that just happens to have text files at the core. Running your own site... is kinda unpleasant. DokuWiki is a pretty good compromise with most of the benefits of straight text.
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
> Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim. Time. Wordpress for the most part is WYSIWYG. With any of these static site generators I have to learn the conventions, work out how to install and edit themes and generally there is a lot of faffing. > Now what I'd be interested in seeing is an argument for traditional publishers or WordPress users to switch to this sort of stack. There isn't one. It doesn't scale. There is a reason why companies typically use some sort of CMS system. It isn't just ease of editing. You can control when, where and who can publish content to the site. You can localise content. You can version control content. You can have stakeholders review content before it is made public. Doing that with vim, git and a static site generator and some bash scripts is a faff and will frustrate non-techie people that just wanna copy and paste content from Word.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

If there was a decent WYSIWYG editor (like Typora) bundled with Pandoc with a myriad of customizable export options, included with a bunch of high-quality themes and templates, while also having a one-click service to upload to a server for static serving, then I don’t see why not. Maybe the technology stack is not the problem, it’s the presentation of it that makes non-tech people gawk at the complexity. Though the biggest problem with this stack is that everything breaks down when you’re doing anything serious with images or layouting.

mynameismon 5y ago
I think the larger part of the problem is exactly what the author seems to miss: even using Jeykll is scary for non-technical users, let alone git. (Try getting your grandfather to restore his accidently deleted posts)
scary-size 5y ago
That's what I experienced building a static site generator for my dad. You would just dump markdown into a dropbox folder. A cron job would poll from dropbox and generate the website. But even markdown is too daunting for a non-techie. Non-technical users are probably not used to write "code"/"mark-up" and have a good grasp at what's coming out on the other side. The visual aspect, a sort of preview, is missing. There are a lot of options to preview markdown. That's just another hurdle, another tool they might have to learn. It's all just so loosely integrated, even I have a hard time putting it together. Might be fun for us to fiddle around, but it isn't if you just want to put your content out there. I've started to work on an alternative: Desktop app, with a block based editor (text, images, headings nothing more). Shows a local preview of your site. Outputs static assets and/or uploads directly to Vercel for hosting. Few knobs to fiddle around.
- SllX 5y ago
  Why not a WYSIWYG HTML editor? At the end of the day Markdown is just an intermediary shorthand for the eventual output, originally HTML; and HTML is actually standardized. If you’re not going to use the Markdown syntax, then wouldn’t an HTML editor that hides all the HTML do the job?
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    Actually, you’re right. The only thing people actually need is a good WYSIWYG editor; the format is probably uninteresting to the end user. Though there is a case to be made for using an open, well-documented format (whether it be Markdown or HTML or something else), since without this openness third-party developers would have trouble in developing and customizing their own exporters. Well, if you’re suggesting HTML (or XML) for that job, then maybe it’s time to resurrect XLST instead of using Pandoc… (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT)
  - scary-size 5y ago
    There would still be a lot of moving parts on the table. What to do with all these HTML files? How do I link them together? How do I get those files to a hosting provider? Where do I handle global styling? For the content creating itself a WYSIWYG editor would be fine, but there's more to the process. I'm also guilty of the builder mentality. It's just a fun project to work on and it benefits at least on other person :)
trasz 5y ago
How would content created with WYSIWYG editor work (and look decent) on any device other than it was created for, eg a phone?

matkoniecz 5y ago

I expect that for book writing content may be doable in markdown, but real book will require more advanced format. LaTeX? I am not going to argue against vim but I would argue against being forced or expected to use it.

boris_m 5y ago
You can have the content in markdown and then go through LaTeX for additional stuff (title page, headers and footers etc.)

eternityforest 5y ago

I don't think there is much of an argument. CMSes work and they do a ton of other stuff besides edit text that people want. And they can be cloud managed with no manual setup. Their black box point and click model is great for division of labor. Although, GitHub is a pretty great publishing platform for open source texts, but that's a whole platform that just happens to have text files at the core. Running your own site... is kinda unpleasant. DokuWiki is a pretty good compromise with most of the benefits of straight text.

YEwSdObPQT 5y ago

> Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim. Time. Wordpress for the most part is WYSIWYG. With any of these static site generators I have to learn the conventions, work out how to install and edit themes and generally there is a lot of faffing. > Now what I'd be interested in seeing is an argument for traditional publishers or WordPress users to switch to this sort of stack. There isn't one. It doesn't scale. There is a reason why companies typically use some sort of CMS system. It isn't just ease of editing. You can control when, where and who can publish content to the site. You can localise content. You can version control content. You can have stakeholders review content before it is made public. Doing that with vim, git and a static site generator and some bash scripts is a faff and will frustrate non-techie people that just wanna copy and paste content from Word.