

EpicEditor: An Embeddable JavaScript Markdown Editor - mars
http://oscargodson.github.com/EpicEditor/

======
cwilson
I'd love to implement this instead of a WYSIWYG into our platform, but the
problem is our users (non-technical) are not going to take the time to learn
markdown. Even if we had a guide on the right I have a hunch they would still
be super confused.

Idea: Add buttons to the top (optional) that LOOK like a WYSIWYG (something
they are familiar with), that simply apply markdown around text.

I think you'd see such much wider adoption with that addition, which is
something I'd love to happen, because WYSIWYG's do indeed suck.

~~~
lazerwalker
Agreed 100%. GitHub's wiki UI (example: <http://cl.ly/2T2718220P1Y3h0M330r>)
would be a great place to take inspiration from, since that's almost exactly
what you're talking about.

~~~
gojomo
Github's button-bar is nice, but let me throw up another offbeat idea: a
hybrid toolbar/cheatsheet. It'd have:

• a toolbar-like row of pulldowns: one for 'range/inline' markup (like
bolding), one for 'block/paragraph' markup (like headers, blockquote, code-
indent), and one for complicated inserts (like link+linktext, image+alt)

• each pulldown would be filled with side-by-side entries showing both markup
and effect, like the best cheatsheet/reference pages are laid out

• selecting a bit of markup would do 'the right thing' with the existing
insertion point or selection-range

Thus a user might momentarily click then dismiss the dropdown just to refresh
their memory of the syntax, or actually pick from the dropdown for assisted
inserts. (If they're regularly picking items, it could reorder by 'frecency'
for convenience. If they're usually just looking, it might instead order by
some form of 'infrecency' [1] – don't bother showing familiar constructs that
have been recently typed.)

[1] At the moment while there are thousands of Google hits for ["frecency"]
there are none for ["infrecency"]. It's an infrecently needed concept.

------
antihero
What'd I'd love to see is something that is a WYSIWYG interface for editing
Markdown. Markdown is fantastic and awesome because it limits what people can
do, but expecting clients to learn it is a pain in the arse.

~~~
wmblaettler
<http://hallojs.org> does this, it was on HN yesterday.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Looks great, but by default it subjects the user to the markdown gotcha of
wanting to italicize text_with_underscores_in_it. EpicEditor, by contrast, has
italicizing underscores_inside_words turned off.

------
guptaneil
This looks cool, but unfortunately does not work well on touch devices. It
looks like the preview and maximize buttons depend on the hover event.

~~~
johnmdonahue
This is the next thing we'll be tackling after IE8 support actually. It'll
have a totally custom look for mobile.
<https://github.com/OscarGodson/EpicEditor/issues/27>

------
DanielRibeiro
Hint: the maximize button splits the screen, and giving you editor/look view
(like coffeescript site does for coffee/js).

------
drewmclellan
This is similar in many ways to MarkItUp (<http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/>),
which I've had good experiences with.

One potential pitfall with JavaScript preview of Markdown (or Textile, or any
other similar language) is that if you're not using the same script to
transform the content at the server side, the final output can contain subtle
differences. Not all implementations are precisely equal. If differences do
occur, that can be frustrating for the user who just carefully previewed their
work.

An alternative (albeit a more resource intensive one) would be to make ajax
requests back to the server and have it perform the transformation and return
it to the page. Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be satisfactory
for realtime previewing.

~~~
codeka
I used to use MarkItUp but eventually moved away from markdown altogether. I
found I had to keep tweaking the parser to allow stuff like inline, floated
images, code blocks with language-tagging (for syntax highlighting) and so on.
It came to be more work than just using a WYSIWYG editor.

------
dfischer
I think it would be better if it offered some way to see a cheat sheet. I
don't see that in the initial examples and too lazy to investigate.

~~~
techwraith
That's not really in the scope of the project, but it could certainly be added
on.

------
pstuart
Nice. MultiMarkdown would be even cooler!

~~~
techwraith
The parser is completely interchangeable, it would be a one line change to
make this work (with just about any language you have a parser for).

------
easternmonk
I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Most certainly I
will try this out.

------
Produce
Is the 'epic' supposed to be ironic?

------
president
This is brilliant.

------
NHQ
very nice!

------
skylamer
similar:

<http://hallojs.org>

------
tubbo
That's...fucking awesome.

