
Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop - erusev
http://caret.io/
======
Bostwick
I tried the application, and it looks great!

One thing Caret gets right that other Markdown editors (Macdown is what I
currently use) don't is wordcount. In Caret, the document wordcount is always
visible in the upper right corner, and if I select some text, the wordcount
for the selection is displayed again. Others have mentioned the lack of live-
preview as a deal-breaker, but I'm ok with this because of the easy, obvious
shortcut. My main purpose with Markdown editors is writing READMEs and blog
posts, and I usually don't keep live-preview open as I'm writing.

The one missing feature to keep me from pre-ordering is detection of jekyll
YAML headers.

~~~
antback
Why is so important for you the wordcount feature? I don't get it.

~~~
masukomi
I'm with antback on this one. You write as many words as are needed to convey
your message. Unless you are a journalist or a student, why does it matter?

Also, if you're serious about word count and other metadata about your
document then you should look into Marked 2. It's got that and much more.

------
omegote
Any Markdown editor worth its salt should have a permanent live preview
without having to be pressing Contrl + P all the time.

The lack of good desktop Markdown editors used to haunt me, until I started
building one my own and realized how poor the support for Markdown in C++ was.

~~~
stdbrouw
For me, the point of Markdown (and LaTeX for that matter) is that I can focus
on just the writing, not what my document will look like.

~~~
atmosx
Really, you can focus on writing with LaTeX? Are we talking about paragraph
after paragraph of text or scientific writing with images and formulas and
code, because after writing my thesis in LaTeX my experience has been
different. I've lost a huge amount of time trying to adjust images, debugging
compilations errors, etc.

Of course the document looks clean as it should and stands out from the rest,
but still, I wasn't able to _focus on writing_ , I had to always double-check
for errors. VIM plugin for latex helped a great deal.

------
drew-y
The big thing I would like to see in Markdown editors like this is a pdf
export. It'd be nice to be able to send a rendered markdown document to people
without them needing to open a web browser to view it. There is a similar open
source project here:
[https://github.com/dvcrn/markright](https://github.com/dvcrn/markright)

~~~
stdbrouw
It'd be nice to have it be part of the editor, but `pandoc document.md -o
document.pdf` does the trick.

[http://pandoc.org/getting-started.html](http://pandoc.org/getting-
started.html)

~~~
biggest_lou
That's fine for a single document, but definitely doesn't work for an entire
directory structure worth of Markdown files

~~~
stdbrouw
Are you serious? Try `ls *.md | xargs -I {} pandoc {} -o {}.pdf`

------
gamache
Serious question: why is this not implemented a Vim/Sublime/Atom/Emacs plugin?

~~~
Honzo
People writing in markdown aren't necessarily developers that want all the
extra baggage.

Atom already ships with a markdown preview pane as well.

~~~
stronglikedan
With the exception of Atom, aren't those all just text editors when not
extended? (Another serious question; I don't know for sure.) If so, what would
be the extra baggage beyond a markdown only editor?

------
thedaemon
For _Mac_ , not _Desktop_.

~~~
bachmeier
Currently, but Windows and Linux are coming, according to the page.

~~~
organsnyder
Until they ship something, that promise is completely useless for users of
those platforms.

------
kitsunesoba
What annoys me about the flurry of Markdown editors for OS X is that they’re
almost all electron/webkit based and as such, notoriously heavy. Doing a quick
test with a 3KB Markdown file with 7 different editors (including Caret), I’m
finding that they all take between 60MB-130MB of memory.

RAM may be at a surplus now, but in my mind there’s no reason for such a light
task to be that resource intensive. What’d I’d really like to see is a sort of
“sublime” approach to markdown editing — a cross-platform, ultra-light, lean
and mean editor written in C++. If all of the functionality Sublime Text
encompasses only requires ~30MB of memory, something as specialized as a
Markdown editor ought to be able to be chopped down to two-thirds or even half
of that.

------
smoovej
I just want to say great job with this. Really really enjoying using it so far
today. More than happy to preorder.

Well done, looking forward to 2.0!

~~~
erusev
Thanks, we put a lot of love (and effort) into it so it makes us very happy to
hear this.

------
louhike
Too bad it is not based on CommonMark. They made a great effort to make a
standard.

~~~
erusev
We are moving in that direction. Please, consider that this is still a beta.

------
sdegutis
So, it shows your text as a hybrid of plain _and_ rich text?

Cool. I tried to write a similar app.

But I couldn't find a rich-text-view API that didn't eat all my CPU all the
time.

OP: How did you manage to solve that issue? Or do you just ignore it and let
the CPU go crazy?

------
c0achmcguirk
For you vim lovers and Mac users out there, Marked 2 [1] in live reload mode
works pretty great. For vim I like the vim-markdown plugin [2].

I get live preview, 9 different styles, code formatting, the ability to export
to word, PDF, HTML, ODT, and RTF...and for blogging you get a word count at
the bottom. It even analyzes your text for writing style like passive voice,
long words, etc.

[1] - [http://marked2app.com/](http://marked2app.com/) [2] -
[https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-
markdown](https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown)

------
ryanSrich
Getting a 404 on
`[http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg`](http://cdn.caret.io/Caret.dmg`) \- Has
anyone else been able to download this morning? I also pre-ordered.

------
thenomad
Any chance this will have a plugin language for exporters? I desperately want
something like MarkdownPad but with the ability to write an exporter for
BBCode.

------
ahoge
I'm quite happy with VS Code and this Markdown CSS theme:

[https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-
theme](https://github.com/mahonnaise/vs-code-markdown-theme)

The automatic table formatting was pretty cool though (even if it's purely
cosmetic).

------
eugenekolo2
What exactly makes this any better than MacDown (OSX), and Markdown Pad 2
(Windows)? Both have side live preview, and accomplish pretty much everything.
There could be some QOL improements in them, but I don't see how caret.io is
much better.

~~~
stdbrouw
Some of the shortcuts look better thought out in Caret (in particular the
inline file browser), but mostly, it just looks slicker. For 5 bucks, I don't
expect it to be "much better", just a little better.

------
coherentpony
What Markdown is lacking, in my opinion, is a standard that was curated by the
community.

~~~
kgrin
What about [http://commonmark.org](http://commonmark.org)?

~~~
coherentpony
I like the spirit of that effort, but it has a checkered history; it was born
out of input from a private working group without input from the community
[1]. I'm fundamentally against this philosophy as an open source advocate.

[1] [http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-
markdown/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-flavored-markdown/)

------
anc84
I can highly recommend ReText. [https://github.com/retext-
project/retext](https://github.com/retext-project/retext)

------
stdbrouw
Guess we can't keep waiting for the vaporware that is Mou 1.0.

~~~
petepete
Will MacDown fit the bill for the time being?

[http://macdown.uranusjr.com/](http://macdown.uranusjr.com/)

------
bndw
[http://trymarkdown.com](http://trymarkdown.com)

* Live preview

* Saves content in LocalStorage so it can persist closing the browser

------
fiatjaf
It's really bizarre that there are so many Desktop Markdown Editors. And they
even cost money!

Really bizarre.

------
abritishguy
The only feature I think is actually pretty useful is the autocomplete of the
title underlines.

------
softinio
Is this free?

~~~
erusev
The beta is free. The stable release is going to cost $10.

