
ReText – Markdown Editor with Live Preview - redthrow
http://sourceforge.net/p/retext/home/ReText/
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robbiep
Sorry to take this off topic but seeing as many here have developed their own
markdown editors - I have a specific use case where I want to integrate a
markdown editor with my backend (multiple technically unskilled users adding
information in markdown, to render in html and eventually be pushed to mobile
devices) I MUST HAVE a side-by-side editor (currently I use mark able.in which
I have found satisfactory) but it doesn't have an api and often doesn't
maintain scroll position.

If anyone is interested in making available their editor/working with me in
implementing this solution then my humble startup could spare a few peanuts,
please reach out to me(Python/flask backend, with PostgreSQL for persistence)

~~~
sdsk8
This guy: [https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/)

It's opensource and have export hooks!

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chuckouellet
I mostly use StackEdit [https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/)

By far the most elegant markdown editor I found.

~~~
pothibo
StackEdit is very nice, it's certainly one of the best.

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aslakhellesoy
What's the target group of Markdown editors with preview?

I love Markdown and use it a lot, but do people really wonder what their
headers and bullet lists are going to look like?

~~~
japhyr
I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to start encouraging students to write
in Markdown instead of Word. It would be a lot easier to do that with an
application like this. But I haven't looked into it too closely, so I'm not
sure what the best tools are for starting to use Markdown with students.

~~~
auxym
What? Why? Word and md/html solve quite different problems, the way I see it.
Word is very much for paper-oriented documents while md/html are for screen-
first.

Word is far from my favorite document preparation system [1] (let's call it
that), but it still has many advantages over markdown,

* Html rendering has no concept of pagination. Paginating naively from html (ie printing from a browser) makes ugly documents.

* Word has tools for managing references and bibliography generation

* Also automatic numbering and referencing of tables, figures, etc.

Those are just OTOH features I'd consider important for writing a high school
history report or whatever. If this were word '97 we were talking about, I'd
understand, but modern Word is a quite powerful tool.

I don't mean to bash or disrepect, just genuinely curious if you'd considered
this or you had specific reasons for switching to markdown.

[1] I've really been liking LyX for the past years, but it might be a bit much
for your typical high school student. I've been considering trying out an
asciidoc -> docbook -> (latex -> pdf or straight docbook to html) workflow.
Maybee ascii would interest you, similar plain-text formatting like md but
more full featured.

~~~
japhyr
Fair questions.

Word works well for students' final work, but it seems to get in the way when
students are building their understanding of a topic. I like that Markdown has
enough formatting options to organize a document, but not so many options that
people get lost in modifying fonts and font sizes, etc.

I'm curious to see if using Markdown while doing exploratory assignments would
help students focus more on the information they're learning and documenting,
rather than how the final document looks. I'd also like to expose students to
a different approach to structuring documents; for many of them, they haven't
used anything other than Word.

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pothibo
Looks good! I've also worked on a markdown editor since january but it's web-
based and while it's hooked on my blogging engine, I'm planning to make it
available as a standalone library down the road. It might not be obvious, but
the markdown on top is the actual editor. You can test ride it.

[http://ecrire.io/](http://ecrire.io/)

More the merrier!

(Small disclaimer: I have never tested it on IE...)

~~~
barosl
I like this kind of partial rendering, which preserves the markdown markup.
Months ago, I've investigated some alternatives in this regard, such as:

[https://github.com/lepture/editor](https://github.com/lepture/editor)

[https://github.com/airpub/ninja](https://github.com/airpub/ninja)

But nothing was perfect for my criterion. I hope your solution will become the
one I've been looking for.

One concern is that it doesn't seem to support the ``` syntax, but the ~~~
syntax. Would that be possible to also support the former? Also, are you
planning to conform to the CommonMark specification?

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jakeway
You can also checkout [http://dillinger.io/](http://dillinger.io/) for a web-
based Markdown editor

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redthrow
This is the first time I learned about WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You
Mean).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM)

Both plain text editors (e.g. gedit) and word processors (e.g. LibreOffice
Writer) frustrated me so this is perfect for my needs.

~~~
auxym
Check out LyX! Not affiliated or anything, just great software that for me
hits the sweetspot between Writer and hand-coding Latex. It's simple and
lightweight yet powerful and easy to learn.

[http://www.lyx.org/](http://www.lyx.org/)

~~~
redthrow
Thanks! Does it have live preview? (It's not listed in the features page.)

Also the UI looks really complex compared to ReText. It looks good for people
who write complex documents (e.g. math textbooks) though.

~~~
auxym
It does not have live preview, it uses latex in the backend so you have to
compile to view your changes.

I have found the interface mostly intuitive myself (ymmv). It has absolutely
no problem doing simple documents, quite the opposite actually, it makes it
very simple.

Looking at the web page, I agree it does not make this very clear. The docs
come as LyX documents packaged with the software, if you feel like having a
look, install it and hit help > tutorial

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ExpiredLink
Any alternative for Windows users?

~~~
bdat
I wrote a chrome extension called Symplie that lets you write and view notes
in Markdown:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/symplie/kjadigajmc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/symplie/kjadigajmcobihfbbhmdeljohoccbejk)

~~~
andmalc
Pretty sharp. I like the preview toggle - seems to me that keeping the preview
visable all the time like other editors is a waste of space.

Since it saves to Chrome local storage, wouldn't notes get synced along with
other Chrome data?

~~~
bdat
I'm actually just using IndexedDB so it doesn't sync. I use Chrome storage to
cache the license (in case you were wondering about the permissions). There is
a special Chrome storage sync api but it's limited to 800kb I think. I'm still
exploring a good way to implement (unlimited) sync. Thanks for the feedback!

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stcredzero
All this stuff with Markdown. I suppose it's either a matter of time, or it's
already happened: a Markdown literate programming environment, _a la_ Donald
Knuth.

~~~
samatman
I gave it a shot at one point:

[https://github.com/mnemnion/marmalade](https://github.com/mnemnion/marmalade)

Lately I've been using babel in org-mode, it's a bit clunky, but it works.
Metalanguages require really, really good tooling; the first project to solve
the basic problems is likely to prove quite popular.

Note that while I used to think literate programming was cool, it's actually a
subset of the kind of living programmable document which Babel can produce.
I'm more impressed at the moment by the ways one can chain various languages
together with the results of calling them.

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tlarkworthy
Will someone please develop one with spell check? Dillinger.io fails this too.
I use ia writer but its not ideal for other features.

~~~
simple10
StackEdit [1] has spell check. Or more specifically, it does not block the
browser's native spell check in the editor. It also doesn't suffer from slow
down with larger documents [2].

[1]
[https://github.com/benweet/stackedit](https://github.com/benweet/stackedit)

[2]
[https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger/issues/301](https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger/issues/301)

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KyleBrandt
Alternative for Mac users:
[http://macdown.uranusjr.com/](http://macdown.uranusjr.com/)

~~~
shared4you
Another one for Mac: [Multimarkdown Composer][1]. A friend of mine uses it and
I think it worked well.

[1]: [http://multimarkdown.com/](http://multimarkdown.com/)

~~~
gabehammersmith
Yet another alternative for Mac users: [http://25.io/mou/](http://25.io/mou/)

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bdcravens
They're probably not as feature-rich, but I find the plugins available for
Atom and Sublime Text to meet this need.

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insin
vmd [1] is handy for quick previewing, especially if you're editing for
GitHub.

If I had to jump out of my regular editor to write Markdown or
reStructuredText, I probably wouldn't be using them.

[1] [https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/vmd](https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/vmd)

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btreecat
I didn't find it's usability for RST docs all that great.

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Dewie
Markdown seems to be a lightweight, readable, unobtrusive markup language for
relatively simple documents.

Considering that, hasn't markdown (or one of its dialects) failed if someone
feels motivated to use a dedicated editor for it? The side-by-side preview
feels particularly ironic considering markdown's purpose, though I guess it is
nice to have as a check that you didn't mess up closing a paren and other
syntax-things.

~~~
redthrow
> nice to have as a check

I think this is exactly the purpose of having live preview, just like it's
nice to have spell checker even for experienced writers. It's nice to know
when something goes wrong immediately.

Also, Markdown's syntax spec, while relatively short, is not something people
can memorize immediately, especially for syntax elements they don't use often.

