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Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render th
by VerifiedReports 9mo ago
Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then?
Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked. But that's all I could find. Otherwise you have to load MD files in some kind of editor and "preview" them. NO! I just want to double-click on the file and READ it, with the formatting applied. Why is that so hard?
- stouset 9mo ago> that render them as intended Markdown is the intended rendering medium.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoHaha, right.
- nine_k 9mo agoPlenty of browser extensions exist, from barebones to fancy which support several flavors, include Mermaid and MathML, etc.
- zeppelin101 9mo agoI'm personally a huge fan of Typora. It's available on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
- physicles 9mo agoTypora is the best markdown authoring experience out there, even surpassing obsidian imho. I wish I could use it every time I interact with markdown.
- binaryIsBetter 9mo agoNever heard of Typora before, but after looking it up it is an instant buy for me. Thanks for sharing!
- esperent 9mo agoThere's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that. Try copying some markdown into these places: - A reddit comment - Microsoft Teams - Slack - Whatsapp - Discord - Google Docs - Discord - Notion - Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think) Etc.
- chrisweekly 9mo agoAnd Obsidian! Best of them all.
- rapnie 9mo agoMatrix, Discourse. I wish that Signal supported it though.
- stavros 9mo agoI love Signal, but this is one thing I wish it did better. It's much easier to write Markdown than long-press and format.
- JoBrad 9mo agoMost repo browser UIs, and apps like VSCode, too.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoAgain, the point is not to launch an EDITOR and then open up a "preview." The point is to double-click and start reading the document as formatted. You know... like we can do with even the maligned PDF. Think about the word "preview." If you're "previewing" the Markdown file, what are you previewing its appearance in?
- Tagbert 9mo agoAnd BBEdit
- VerifiedReports 9mo ago
- chrisweekly 9mo agoTry Obsidian. Its "LiveView" editor mode is fantastic.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoThanks. I don't want to launch an editor and then invoke a preview. I just want to double-click and read the damned file, formatted as intended. It's mystifying that people don't recognize the pointlessness of a markup format that's almost never rendered as the markup dictates.
- chrisweekly 9mo agoYou're welcome. Respectfully, you've made some invalid assumptions. Even if your only use case is reading extant markdown, using Obsidian as your viewer probably still makes sense. Trivial, one-time config to open .md files in Read mode, and one-time system config to associate .md files with Obsidian, and voila: "double-click and read the damned file". That said, if you were then to spend even a little time in Obsidian doing things other than reading, your "mystification" about "pointlessness" would vanish. Markdown is flexible and portable, eminently readable by machines and people (whether viewed raw or rendered), and Obsidian is an incredibly powerful tool for leveraging its capabilities.
- SamBam 9mo ago> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers Huh? Any open-source project on GitHub, at least, has the viewer right there. It's the default view of markdown files. I assume other repos are similar. E.g. The readme https://github.com/jquery/jquery https://github.com/jquery/jquery
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoDo you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github? And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
- SamBam 9mo agoYou said almost no viewers. I'm pointing out that the GitHub website has a built-in viewer. If you're looking at the code locally, what editor do you use that doesn't have a markdown viewer? I use Sublime with MarkdownLivePreview. Although honestly I generally don't, because md is so easy to read without a viewer.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- encrypted_bird 9mo agoA lot of the responses to your comment imo are kinda missing your point. I don't use Apple products, but I do understand what you're saying. You want an editor that also has an option for previewing the markup text in its formatted view. It's officially only available for Linux (the Windows version is currently under development), and like I said, I don't use Apple products, and idk how familiar you are with manually compiling source code or how good Wine is on Macs, but maybe [Remarkable](https://remarkableapp.github.io/ https://remarkableapp.github.io/) could be an option? Just thought I'd give my $2.70. ;)
- rabf 9mo ago`glow` is a pretty handy terminal mardown viewer.
- sixtyj 9mo agoObsidian is on Mac too. And it has live preview of md. https://obsidian.md/download https://obsidian.md/download
- quintu5 9mo agoMarkdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/ https://tachicode.com/). Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoThanks. That's a start, I guess!
- somat 9mo agoThat is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoIt's NOT nice-looking plain text. It's text littered with a bunch of formatting characters that aren't respected by any lightweight viewer. So why have them in there? I'm not proposing to make it a better markup language. I just want to VIEW it with the formatting that it calls for. It's mystifying that people are actually opposed to this. It's like a massive psychology-class experiment, when a bunch of confederates champion an obviously-absurd point of view to see if the subject of the experiment will hold his ground.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. Huh? If you find a markdown file in a project on Github, I have every confidence that it renders as intended in Github's markdown viewer.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoDo you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github? And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
- thaumasiotes 9mo agoYou might have difficulty doing that without using a browser, given that markdown renders to HTML.
- ValentineC 9mo ago> And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked. I like MacDown [1]. Someone recently forked it to MacDown 3000 [2]. [1] https://macdown.uranusjr.com https://macdown.uranusjr.com [2] https://macdown.app https://macdown.app