
Texts Editor - True WYSIWYG Markdown - sheremetyev
http://www.textseditor.com/
======
omaranto
Can 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?

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njharman
I 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.

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sheremetyev
You are right, WYSIWYM is more correct term. Formatting in the editor shows
document structure and not exact rendering.

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macmac
Looks 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?

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sheremetyev
Thanks! 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.

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carterschonwald
You 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.

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ecaradec
I 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.

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sheremetyev
It's an early prototype. Please let me know what you think about the approach.
Thanks!

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ssn
Two feature suggestions: view and edit source and pandoc integration with a
"View as..." menu option.

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sheremetyev
Thanks! 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?

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navs
I'd like to point out a similar app: Mou <http://mouapp.com/>

Good to have alternatives, especially for the Windows platform.

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wildster
Any plans for a Linux version?

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sheremetyev
Yes, most likely after releasing Windows and Mac versions. May be after a
version for iPad. It depends on the feedback.

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bootload
_"... May be after a version for iPad. ..."_

this would yield a better result financially.

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potomak
A cool project.

Note: it doesn't recognize .md or .markdown file extensions on OSX

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omgmog
I can confirm this.

Would be nice if it did, for authoring blog posts to be used with Jekyll

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sachdevaprash
Doesn't emacs org-mode perform a similar function?

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rcthompson
Org-mode performs a similar function to markdown. Not similar to a WYSIWYM
editor for markdown.

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wink
The renderer seems to be easily confused, I'm using 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.

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Zolomon
I get lots of errors running this on Windows 7, shall I send them to
support@textseditor.com?

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sheremetyev
Yes, please!

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cheald
I've used MarkdownPad for this on Windows in the past.

<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.

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jiri
Google Chrome 17 has classified it as malware during download.

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sheremetyev
Not sure but it's probably because the .msi is not signed and the web site is
relatively new.

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est
I 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.

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sheremetyev
The 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
> 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 ____

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recurser
Looks good - I've been looking for something exactly like this, to the point
where I'd been considering writing it myself. Nice work!

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___Calv_Dee___
We need more minimalistic apps like this.

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Yeroc
You mention using it to author books. Is there a plan to make support
exporting to epub/mobi formats then?

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sheremetyev
It is possible to create EPUB via pandoc
(<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html>).

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ya3r
I'm pretty sure, opensourcing it will help the application improve.

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rb2k_
> A subset of de-facto standard Markdown is used for markup

How much is missing?

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baranov
why not open source?

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sheremetyev
I'm planning to open source most of the parsing/formatting/API code. Making
everything open source would not make it sustainable. Sorry.

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systems
Well, 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

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zyfo
Looks 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.

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sheremetyev
Thanks!

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.

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Craiggybear
Won't run on OS X 10.5.8.

Pity. Just what I was looking for.

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sheremetyev
I think it's fixable. Thanks for reporting!

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Craiggybear
It would be great if it were possible ... I have reasons for not wanting OS X
10.6 or upwards.

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kurige
Care to share? I'm a mac developer and I just recently dropped support for <
10.6 in all of my apps.

