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Texts Editor - True WYSIWYG Markdown
- sheremetyev 15y agoIt's an early prototype. Please let me know what you think about the approach. Thanks!
- ssn 15y agoTwo feature suggestions: view and edit source and pandoc integration with a "View as..." menu option.
- sheremetyev 15y agoThanks! Do you mean that menu options like "View as HTML", "View as PDF" etc. should process the current file with pandoc and display the resulting file?
- jamesrcole 15y agoJust from reading the web-site and looking at the images, I don't think it's clear enough as to what the editor does. I presume you edit the document in the 'rendered' view (as opposed to the plain text), probably like in a word processor where apply formatting by selecting text and clicking buttons or pressing key-combos -- but I don't think there's anything there that clearly indicates that. There's some degree of mixed-messages with the way in which it mentions/shows plain-text and markdown.
- tghw 15y agoI'm not sure why, but Chrome is marking the Windows download as potentially malicious. Microsoft Security Essentials says it's okay.
- macmac 15y agoLooks good. Which gui toolkit are you using and do you embed pandoc? Which parts of markdown do you not support and are you planning support for other markup formats like AsciiDoc?
- sheremetyev 15y agoThanks! UI is based on WebKit. Pandoc's license is GPL so I don't think I'll be embedding it. As for Markdown parts – Texts 0.3 supports only blocks of plain text, headers (setext), unordered lists, code and math blocks (pandoc extension) and intervals of bold, italic, code, math and links. Only simple links (<URL>) are supported for now. The idea is to expand syntax gradually, focusing on simplicity of user interaction. There are too many flavours of Markdown out there and several ways of writing the same structure in Gruber's Markdown is not a good thing, IMHO. There is no real need to decide between _italic_ and italic. The object model of the text that is implemented is as simple as possible: blocks and spans (without nested spans). It shouldn't be a problem to implement essential parts of AsciiDoc and other plain text markups. When these formats get into the product depends on the interest from users. I'm planning to expose an API to allow implementation of formats as plugins.
- ecaradec 15y agoOne way to include pandoc support would be to expose it via a webservice on your server.
- carterschonwald 15y agoYou could "package" it by creating a separate component that's simply a pandoc process and have the two parts talk via one of the various serialization protocols on hackage (after all, web browsers need not be gpl just because the web server is). Itd be a shame to have to redo stuff that pandoc already does very nicely.
- ecaradec 15y agoI am almost sure that this is covered by the gpl. Servers source code is protected because it is not distributed to the end user, not because there is some kind of a bridge between gpl code & your code.
- Zolomon 15y agoI get lots of errors running this on Windows 7, shall I send them to support@textseditor.com?
- sheremetyev 15y agoYes, please!
- wildster 15y agoAny plans for a Linux version?
- sheremetyev 15y agoYes, most likely after releasing Windows and Mac versions. May be after a version for iPad. It depends on the feedback.
- bootload 15y ago"... May be after a version for iPad. ..." this would yield a better result financially.
- ghost91 15y ago+1
- recurser 15y agoLooks good - I've been looking for something exactly like this, to the point where I'd been considering writing it myself. Nice work!
- est 15y agoI really hope it could support inline markdown syntax editing When line is active, edit markdown source, else display rendered line. Support for inline LaTeX editing is a bonus.
- sheremetyev 15y agoThe idea was to make Markdown accessible for those who don't want to learn the syntax. But switching code block style (Cmd+3 on Mac or Ctrl+3 on Windows) on and off maintains inline syntax. So you can type raw Markdown into a code block and then switch it into plain text paragraph with formatting.
- est 15y ago> for those who don't want to learn the syntax. This can be also done in source code mode. For example, select few words, select Bold from the menu, then these words are wrapped in
- zyfo 15y agoLooks useful! Two things: 1) How do I make several levels of headers (#, ##, ###, ####)? This is what I use markdown for the most - nesting texts in clearly visible subsections. In the menu I can only see only one header, and in the screenshot I see two (==== and ---). 2) Rendering the PDF side-by-side would be useful. If I understood correctly one currently has to compile to PDF manually, which sort of defeats the purpose of a GUI app.
- sheremetyev 15y agoThanks! 1) Tab/Shift+Tab change the level of header. 2) Yeah, it's "not implemented yet" :) Actually, there are many ways to publish from Markdown, including services like scriptogr.am. So I'm not sure that compiling PDF is the most important feature.
- baranov 15y agowhy not open source?
- sheremetyev 15y agoI'm planning to open source most of the parsing/formatting/API code. Making everything open source would not make it sustainable. Sorry.
- systems 15y agoWell, I would say with all the competition out there is this area ... open sourcing it can actually help you sustain it 1. If it becomes really popular, you can make video tutorials and sell ads on your site 2. You can consider making it donation ware There really isn't much options to build revenue streams around a FOSS text editor Its a tuff area
- Craiggybear 15y agoWon't run on OS X 10.5.8. Pity. Just what I was looking for.
- sheremetyev 15y agoI think it's fixable. Thanks for reporting!
- Craiggybear 15y agoIt would be great if it were possible ... I have reasons for not wanting OS X 10.6 or upwards.
- kurige 15y agoCare to share? I'm a mac developer and I just recently dropped support for < 10.6 in all of my apps.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rb2k_ 15y ago> A subset of de-facto standard Markdown is used for markup How much is missing?
- potomak 15y agoA cool project. Note: it doesn't recognize .md or .markdown file extensions on OSX
- omgmog 15y agoI can confirm this. Would be nice if it did, for authoring blog posts to be used with Jekyll
- sheremetyev 15y agoThanks! I'll fix that. For now you could open .md files using "Open with..." in Finder.
- ___Calv_Dee___ 15y agoWe need more minimalistic apps like this.
- omaranto 15y agoCan someone explain why this is useful? I thought the point of Markdown is that is easy enough on the eyes that you can comfortably edit the.source (and I certainly think it succeeds in that). Why would anyone abandone the comfort of their favorite editor to edit Markdown?
- netnichols 15y agoI'm looking for something kind of like this. Our company website is generated from Markdown, which is great for the devs on the team, but the marketing folks still struggle with it from time to time. So I'd really love to provide them with something that (1) forces UTF-8 on Windows, (2) eases writing in Markdown, and (3) shows the folder structure. I'm currently setting them up with Sublime Edit, but it's not quite ideal as it's overly complex for what they need and I still have to manually configure it to default to UTF-8.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y agoYou can look at markdown et al. from another point of view: it's a file format that is human readable (text) and therefore "safe". Many people care more about rendered markdown than about raw markdown, and would prefer to edit closer to the rendered result than to the human readable but not what they're interested in text. For those people, this eliminates the "write - render - check" cycle.
- njharman 15y agoI don't even understand how wysiwyg can possibly apply to markup. Markup depends on a renderer for wyg. It could be PDF, plain text, HTML, RTF, XML, anything.
- sheremetyev 15y agoYou are right, WYSIWYM is more correct term. Formatting in the editor shows document structure and not exact rendering.
- sciurus 15y agoI'm not sure how useful it is as a desktop application. I suppose it depends on your organization's workflow. If there was an equivalent of ckeditor or tinymce that could output markdown or textile instead of html, I'd find that extremely useful.
- ya3r 15y agoI'm pretty sure, opensourcing it will help the application improve.
- jiri 15y agoGoogle Chrome 17 has classified it as malware during download.
- sheremetyev 15y agoNot sure but it's probably because the .msi is not signed and the web site is relatively new.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sachdevaprash 15y agoDoesn't emacs org-mode perform a similar function?
- rcthompson 15y agoOrg-mode performs a similar function to markdown. Not similar to a WYSIWYM editor for markdown.
- navs 15y agoI'd like to point out a similar app: Mou http://mouapp.com/ http://mouapp.com/ Good to have alternatives, especially for the Windows platform.
- Yeroc 15y agoYou mention using it to author books. Is there a plan to make support exporting to epub/mobi formats then?
- sheremetyev 15y agoIt is possible to create EPUB via pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html).
- cheald 15y agoI've used MarkdownPad for this on Windows in the past. http://markdownpad.com/ http://markdownpad.com/ If I need a Markdown editor, it's awfully handy to be able to type as Markdown and see it rendered on the fly.
- wink 15y agoThe renderer seems to be easily confused, I'm using hyde ( http://ringce.com/hyde http://ringce.com/hyde ) and Texts doesn't recognize my files as markdown. They have Django template syntax mixed in, so for example: {% extends "_foo.html" %} {% block article %} MarkdownPad seems to manage to convert the markdown bits just fine.