
Show HN: Twincl Editor – A WYSIWYG/Markdown dual-mode editor - arthurtw
https://twincl.com/site/help/*68a
======
dunham
My favorite model for editing markdown is the one that usecanvas.com and
FoldingText (an OSX app) use.

They present the document as WYSIWYG with markdown hidden, but unhide any
markdown surrounding or directly adjacent to the cursor. (So the markup from
an italic or link span are only visible if you are adjacent to or within the
span.)

It's a nice balance between looking pretty and letting me edit markdown
directly. I'd love to have an open source editor library that acts like this.

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athenot
The ability to toggle between markdown syntax and HTML on a _per-paragraph_
basis is an awesome feature! I often prefer the HTML/wysiwyg version but have
to occasionally insert something complex which is trivial in markdown. This
hits the sweetspot!

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Sephr
It doesn't let you use Markdown by default as a seamless input method like
Typora[1]. This editor seems much less productive as you are forced to use
your mouse to click on GUI elements.

[1]: [https://www.typora.io/](https://www.typora.io/)

~~~
arthurtw
It does not force you to use mouse click on GUI elements. You can use `⌘`+`/`
(or `Alt`+`/` on Windows) to switch between WYSIWYG/Markdown modes. Actually
it's the preferred way unless you are on mobile devices.

The default mode is WYSIWYG since Markdown syntax frustrates people who don't
know Markdown well.

Thanks for mentioning Typora! It's an interesting implementation. I've thought
about that approach (in-place real-time preview as you type Markdown text)
before, but inside a browser, it's too cumbersome to fight against the
inconsistent _contenteditable_ behavior.

~~~
pluma
Fun fact: there's no "/" key on the German keyboard layout (and possibly
others too): to type "/" you need to press Shift + 7.

~~~
arthurtw
Wow, that's fun. No wonder few applications use "/" for hotkey combination.
Maybe I should use a different key, say, ".".

~~~
zokier
Yeah, European keyboard layouts are annoying like that. Too bad that it seems
unlikely that they would ever change even if there is some talk in France that
they want to reform their keyboard: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2016/01/france-says-azert...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2016/01/france-says-azerty-keyboards-fail-french-typists/)

There was a project in Finland to reform keyboard layout ("Kotoistus"), only
thing they managed to do is to add more dead-key accents and make the keyboard
even more annoying to technical users. In all their great wisdom they decided
to add non-breaking space character to altgr-spacebar key combination. In
isolation that might seem like a good idea, but when also | character required
the use of altgr-modifier it was a mess: working with the command line, you
tend to have stuff like ... | grep foo. Soon enough there were plenty of users
wondering why bash complains that grep is not found:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/218637](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/218637)

Personally, I have abandoned national keyboard layout and adapted US layout
instead. Makes both programming and general use much more comfortable. Its
amazing how much less I need to use modifier keys now, especially the painful
altgr.

~~~
erelde
The French project would be even worse for us French coders.

Symbols used for code would be hidden behind several layers like altgr
combinations. While, imo, archaic symbols (ÇÀÉÈàçê, etc) would be on the first
layer.

I'm planning on doing the same as parent, using the US layout, but I can't
change my keyboard at work, and although I can type in qwerty, I don't know
all the layers like I do azerty, so I can't just type without looking.

~~~
slang800
You can't change your keyboard at work? That's odd... Where do you work?

~~~
erelde
Large org, windows, non admin rights. Don't have the rights to plug non
approved usb devices.

I can't even use another text editor than the one I have. All those 'vim vs
emacs' war-jokes make me laugh. What I wouldn't give to use vim...

I can change the software layout, but as I said, I don't know enough the
sublayers of the qwerty layout to be able to type without looking.

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inatreecrown
"(If you post any article by 8/31, the membership will be extended to the end
of 2016; then we’ll see how things go and decide what to do next.)"

aren't these rather crazy terms for a text editor ?

~~~
arthurtw
Those terms are for the site, not for the text editor. :-) I might open source
the editor when I have time.

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techplex
Any chance it is or will be open sourced?

~~~
arthurtw
Not yet. I might do that later, but it requires some cleanup work.

The code has three parts: Markdown to HTML text, HTML DOM to Markdown, and the
editor. The total size is about 30KB uncompressed (27KB JS + 3KB CSS). It
didn't use any icon font or images.

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wodenokoto
I must admit that the way Jupyther/ipython notebooks do markdown is my
favorite.

It has all the markup showing, and italize, boldens and changes size of text
according to the tags, as well as color coding.

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louhike
Does it use a "standard" like CommonMark or GFM?

~~~
arthurtw
Yes it follows CommonMark, but is stricter for safety consideration (e.g. does
not allow scripts).

~~~
louhike
Nice ! Thanks for the answer.

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stuffonkeyboard
Does this use CommonMark standard?

~~~
louhike
Yes, see my question and the answer of the poster below.

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ripperdoc
Any Github page?

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caub
it's pretty basic, I made a more extended one
[https://caub.github.io/cms/wysi/](https://caub.github.io/cms/wysi/) markdown
isn't really helpful there, since anyway you're just using execCommand

~~~
arthurtw
Yes, its HTML editing is pretty basic. I did not intend to make a full-blown
HTML editor. There are already many ones.

My goal is to make Markdown and HTML editors working together. I want to
support Markdown because it's very productive for long-form article writing.

