The thing that would make all these markdown editors a killer app for me is an easy way to link between documents. Something like vimwiki, where you can surround a word or group of words with "[[" "]]" and it turns that word into a [[link]]. These apps are great for editing a single document, but fall down when you want to create a notebook or set of interlinked notes.
Well org mode in emacs allows you to do that. I expect anyone reading Hackernews is probably better served by something like org mode in emacs running on some server that is remotely accessible. Then you can use something like tramp to connect to it and edit all your notes in one place. Alternatively just put them under version control and you are able to edit them offline.
I really don't see how an app that implements maybe 1% of all useful features a good editor has could compete for the attention of technical users.
You can try out brainstorm: github.com/Azeirah/brainstorm,
Tags can be used to semantically link notes, or if you want to link to another note, you can just use []() markdown link syntax, each note has its own url.
You can try the demo at sandstorm.io (install brainstorm as an app)
I worked with a friend of mine to write a documentation generator for assembly code. It lets you write your docs with markdown, and has "[[syscall]]" syntax to link to another syscall from your docs. Example:
You could use GitHub. You can link to other documents in the repository using relative paths, there's an editor that's decent, and you get versioning for free too (assuming it's a public repository.)
Gitbook https://www.gitbook.com/ allows relative links between markdown files. if foo.md links to bar.md with [Bar](bar.md) then Gitbook handles the conversion to the appropriate HTML file name when it generates the book. Yes it's intended for "books" but I find it pretty damn useful for anything that would benefit from a table of contents, and the ability to search...
https://stackedit.io/ is my markdown editor of choice. You can sync your documents with Google Drive, Dropbox, publish to GitHub. Really not easy to beat, in my opinion. However, there's no live collaboration feature currently in Stackedit so I'm interested to see what Classeur has to offer in this respect. (Now I see that Stackedit and Classeur are related projects, apparently both authored by https://github.com/benweet).
I spent about an hour looking for a note taking app today. The problem with most markdown editors is that the note taker rarely reads the note in absentia. I mean, I read my notes as I write them and edit them, but more often than not, I am changing them as I read or consult them.
The mou/macdown/classeur approach is to have a preview that can be toggled or visible in split screen mode. Conversely, notes.app on Mac works really well and you can write and read notes on the same "space" but it doesn't support markdown.
Maybe I am an edgecase, but I would like to write notes in markdown and have them render line by line[0] so that I have one document and not an editor and a display. Almost wrote one myself but the opportunity cost of spending weeks making it (if I could even deliver) would likely not offset the bit of frustration I get using another editor.
I'd recommend FoldingText http://www.foldingtext.com/ Like Typora it only displays the markdown while your cursor is in the portion of text with the markdown tags. Otherwise it's the final rendered version. plus you can style it however you want and add your own JavaScript plugins.
http://texts.io/ is my recommnedation. It's WYSIWYM -- write Markdown, view real formatted text. And it uses Pandoc under the hood, so it's exporting tools are awesome; and worst case, kick it out to XeTex and render it exactly how you want
I'm also a believer in in-place formatting rather than 2-pane. Ever since i saw it in [Qute][] (no longer developed), and emacs auctex preview-mode (TiddlyWiki also deserves some credit).
Editorially did this well and was well-recieved but for some reason people are not really filling the void.
I'm especially surprised it's not more popular on mobile where 2 panes waste real estate and whole-screen toggling is jarring. The only mobile editor with in-place formatting I know is Writer & [Writer Plus][].
I'm working on https://mathdown.net [https://github.com/cben/mathdown] which does in-place formatting. It's comparable to Stackedit or Classeur in that it's simply "syntax highlighting", e.g. headings are big and emphasis is italic.
- The formatting chars (#, * etc) are still visible, just a bit de-emphasized. I know many people prefer them to disappear except near the cursor. That's trickier to implement with good UX, and not planned soon (PRs welcome of course).
- There is no inline image preview (yet). Nor tables, diagrams, embedded videos... Even links are not (yet) clickable.
+ There is nice in-place LaTeX math rendering (slighly buggy but very usable). This is my biggest unique feature [https://github.com/cben/CodeMirror-MathJax]. Comparable to Overleaf.com's "rich text" mode.
+ I'm doing "soft indent" [https://www.mathdown.net/?doc=demo-indentwrap]. This is a really low-hanging way to make one-long-line-per-paragraph usable, which IMHO is essential for in-place styling.
+ Leading indentation (and list bullets/numbers/quotation) is monospaced to help align stuff.
If anybody's building their own, I'm using and strongly recommend CodeMirror. It makes mixed fonts - things like bigger headings - really trivial and supports arbitrary embedded "widgets". @benweet pulled off polished in-place formatting in StackEdit (and on top of contenteditable but that's way harder...
I've been looking for an application setup with what I could write my personal (research) journal using vim with markdown annotation and with embedded multimedia (screencaptures, mostly). It would be great to have a possibility to attach files to notes, too.
Of course I would like the setup to be open source. Does anyone have similar needs and perhaps solutions for them? I tried atom with vim-bindings-plugin and markdown-preview but somehow the UI just didn't cut it for me when compared to a native vim.
Please, share your setup if you have anything that resembles my need!
It's early days yet but this is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with stash[0], plus the ability to browse notebooks over HTTP and run/embed dynamic queries into documents. It's essentially a specification of a directory structure for plain-text files and a bunch of tools for doing bulk manipulation. I began migrating all of my notes from Evernote a few months ago and it seems to be handling it well.
vim notes is very good at quickly jotting down and bringing up things from vim; much better than vim-wiki, in my experience. While it can export to html, since the main interface is vim it is not that nice for embedding images and such. Therefore I use vim notes mostly for stuff related to coding, which is naturally text-friendly.
For research notes and results, I've been using zim-wiki.
While it has a GUI, it is a text-based format. Whenever I feel the need for vim shortcuts I just open the page in an external editor (vim), which is even supported in the GUI.
The markup is not markdown but something similar to mediawiki, which is annoying but not a deal breaker. It can embed images, tables and latex equations (though the UI for this could be better; instead of a directly using $$ in the markup, there's a dialog). Since you mention screenshots, it also has a "embed screenshot" plugin which I've been using a lot more than I thought I would. It's also open source and has what seems like a healthy community.
If Evernote integrated Markdown into its mobile, web, and native editors, I would be much closer to an ideal. It's early, but Classeur shows potential to fill this gap.
I tried http://Marxi.co, the so-called "missing Markdown editor for Evernote," but had enough syncing issues during the brief ten-day trial to put me off purchasing a subscription.
There's also a Sublime plugin that offers two-way Markdown conversion into Evernote, but I only have Sublime as a native app, not on mobile or web. https://github.com/timlockridge/SublimeEvernote
Perhaps with Evernote's renewed focus on core product, they'll take a look at improving the experience of the text editor.
Hey Anton, are you attached to using markdown? A nice alternative, and the one I use for my own notes, is Emacs + org-mode. If you're a vim guy, you can load up evil-mode to get the vim keybindings. Org-mode is a really nice piece of software, my three favorite features are:
1. It's really easy to move things around. Moving a section up or down, re-ordering lists, etc. is done with very simple keyboard shortcuts.
2. You can embed source code in your document and you can also execute it and have the result inserted inside the document. This is great if you are describing a piece of code and you want to give examples.
3. Editing tables in org-mode is very easy and very nice.
I'm using tiddlywiki [1] and I absolutely love it. You can host it where you want (owncloud works fine), and it has basically everything you just described.
I edit mainly using the web interface, but you can also edit the "tiddlers" (each note) using any text editor. The note has it's metadata at the beginning of the file.
I think I'm only using a very small % of TW's capabilities, but it feels like a very powerful tool.
On a mac, VooDooPad fits the bill but it is not open source and its future looks murky. If it were open source with an active community of users I think I would use it.
This has kept me on vimwiki with .md extensions so that vim will at least do syntax highlighting for markdown. You can easily link to local multimedia files, but they don't display inline. As a bonus, a diary entry for the day is just <leader>w<leader>w away.
If you were willing to trade markdown for asciidoc (same goal, different execution), then a combination of asciidoc in vim simultaneously with the asciidoc previewed in google chrome could be a good approximation of what you want. Embedded images work quite well because you can easily specify the final width you want the image to take, on the page... for example. Finally, you can easily produce a pdf with 'a2x'.
> write my ... journal using vim with markdown annotation and with embedded multimedia (screencaptures, mostly).
Are you asking for a WYSIWIG editor (one that shows you markdown and/or rendered html and pictures), or are you asking for a workflow where you dump some images in a folder and edit post.md, and link to images with markdown tags?
I don't (yet) actually need/use a blog - but just to see what I might be able to recommend others that ask, I had a look for stuff that works with github pages, and found Jekyll Now: https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now
I wouldn't say it's a great work-flow (there are gnarly bits with Jekyll, with using git, with hosting on github, with tweaking the themes...) -- but overall the out-of-box experience is good. It's not a WYSIWYG-happy-blog type situation, but it is a sane-defaults, not that-hard-if-you're prepared to install some things -- and crucially, it can run in a local "serve" mode that watches the filesystem for changes and gives a near-live preview:
Local Development
(...)
gem install github-pages
(...)
# Clone down your fork
git clone [email protected]:<uid>/<uid>.github.io.git
# Serve the site and watch for markup/sass changes
jekyll serve
I should note that "jekyll serve" is part of standard jekyll; so you don't have to use "Jekyll Now" by any means.
[edit: I should probably add that what I've actually been using myself lately is just IPython (for solving assignments in basic calculus and statistics). Sadly doesn't work with the "It's all text!"-plugin/external editor for vimperator as it doesn't use "plain" input-fields -- so if you do "real" writing, rather than just some code (and graphs generated from said code), you'll probably be better off with something more focused on the Markdown part, like Jekyll]
I write my own research journal using pandoc[0] and a simple mkfile[1]. My requirements are a bit different from yours, though. I don't need embeded multimedia, but I rather use a lot of Unicode characters for mathematics.
Maybe you could use write markdown and convert to HTML5 using Pandoc? Your multimedia could be included with some embedded HTML. If you automate the compilation process suitably, you can have your journal open in your browser while writing in Vim, and see the result almost real-time.
Nice interface, latex support, code block support, doesn't lock up your data, uses pandoc rather than reinventing the wheel. That's how it's supposed to be done.
I'm not sure I'm the target audience (would be hard to justify spending $5/month given my current workflow) but it would be an excellent way to collaborate. If it could handle really large documents, including organizing them into sections, this would be an outstanding tool for commenting on a student's dissertation (in particular, using a tablet).
Curious to get opinions on what you guys consider to be the best OSX app for note-taking in relation to day-to-day dev work, e.g. storing and retrieving documentation, code samples/snippets (with insets, formatting, and colored syntax, so that it's clearly separated from non-code text), etc... Doesn't need to support markdown.
I love Quiver, but syncing it across multiple computers through iCloud is not reliable, otherwise it would practically be perfect.
StackEdit is great, but I don't like how it's tied to a browser. I also don't like being forced to store everything on an external server. I'm willing to make an exception for iCloud because it's so damn convenient -- it's the only form of cloud storage that I use for personal documents.
From reading this thread, I see that Classeur is from the same creator, which is great news :)
Unfortunately, there's no desktop client yet, so it'd be nice to use something else until then.
I currently store markdown (general insensitive documentation that doesn't need to be kept local) and Ruby/Objective-C files (for snippets/examples) on iCloud and read/edit/run them with Textmate.
The editor is great, but the UX flow between creation, upload to Wordpress, save, export is very confusing.
I have not been able to figure out how the connect to Wordpress works in the first place.
The top menu fails to work when in full-screen browser mode (on chrome) because the "you've gone fullscreen" popup blocks access to the top menu.
Not to nitpick, but did anyone else find that some (important) keyboard shortcuts were missing? Ctrl/Alt-Backspace in particular didn't work for me. Though I guess vim doesn't have support for that either.
Wow, have been using computers since age 6 and been a professional dev for 15 years, never even heard of ctrl+backspace :D Thanks.
(I tend to use ctrl+shift+left/right to highlight, then delete. That tends to always work)
Hey. It respects my line-breaks without making me jump through hoops.
Non-standard markdown but a welcome decision.
Numbered lists with gaps and line breaks are still impossible sadly. I'll see if my other personal pet gripes against Markdown are handled any differently when I remember what they are.
Admittedly Word and many other wysiwyg editors are sometimes less than helpful in this area but at least it's possible without resorting to tricks such as using double-dots to defeat the auto-formatting.
> It respects my line-breaks without making me jump through hoops.
And that's why I don't like it. I want to be able to wrap the source without forcing the output to wrap too. Totally a preference thing. Wish there was a way to change it according to your preference.
My favorite one is LightPaper (http://www.ashokgelal.com/lightpaper-for-mac/). With multitabs and a folder navigator, among others, I can keep and edit related documents together. I wish it had a vi mode but other than that it's perfect.
[+] [-] k2enemy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbifold|10 years ago|reply
I really don't see how an app that implements maybe 1% of all useful features a good editor has could compete for the attention of technical users.
[+] [-] azeirah|10 years ago|reply
You can try the demo at sandstorm.io (install brainstorm as an app)
Or you can try a slightly older version here: http://brainstorm-notes.meteor.com/board/Home
Is that similar to what you're looking for?
[+] [-] akrymski|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|10 years ago|reply
http://www.knightos.org/documentation/reference/threading.ht...
https://github.com/KnightOS/kernel/blob/06aeba5442a073d02338...
[+] [-] SlyShy|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I haven't extracted it for public consumption yet, but feel free to take a shot.
[+] [-] unfunco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masukomi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elrodeo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tingol|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlte|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
The mou/macdown/classeur approach is to have a preview that can be toggled or visible in split screen mode. Conversely, notes.app on Mac works really well and you can write and read notes on the same "space" but it doesn't support markdown.
Maybe I am an edgecase, but I would like to write notes in markdown and have them render line by line[0] so that I have one document and not an editor and a display. Almost wrote one myself but the opportunity cost of spending weeks making it (if I could even deliver) would likely not offset the bit of frustration I get using another editor.
If this exists, I want it bad.
[0] or like 3 lines at a time or whatever.
[+] [-] masukomi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octref|10 years ago|reply
[0]: http://typora.io/
[+] [-] girvo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tambourine_man|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc-syntax/blob/master/...
It uses conceal to show bold/italic text and plain markdown on your editing line
[+] [-] cben|10 years ago|reply
Editorially did this well and was well-recieved but for some reason people are not really filling the void. I'm especially surprised it's not more popular on mobile where 2 panes waste real estate and whole-screen toggling is jarring. The only mobile editor with in-place formatting I know is Writer & [Writer Plus][].
[Qute]: http://www.inkcode.net/qute [Writer Plus]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.easy4u.writ...
Also,
---
I'm working on https://mathdown.net [https://github.com/cben/mathdown] which does in-place formatting. It's comparable to Stackedit or Classeur in that it's simply "syntax highlighting", e.g. headings are big and emphasis is italic.
- The formatting chars (#, * etc) are still visible, just a bit de-emphasized. I know many people prefer them to disappear except near the cursor. That's trickier to implement with good UX, and not planned soon (PRs welcome of course).
- There is no inline image preview (yet). Nor tables, diagrams, embedded videos... Even links are not (yet) clickable.
+ There is nice in-place LaTeX math rendering (slighly buggy but very usable). This is my biggest unique feature [https://github.com/cben/CodeMirror-MathJax]. Comparable to Overleaf.com's "rich text" mode.
+ I'm doing "soft indent" [https://www.mathdown.net/?doc=demo-indentwrap]. This is a really low-hanging way to make one-long-line-per-paragraph usable, which IMHO is essential for in-place styling.
+ Leading indentation (and list bullets/numbers/quotation) is monospaced to help align stuff.
If anybody's building their own, I'm using and strongly recommend CodeMirror. It makes mixed fonts - things like bigger headings - really trivial and supports arbitrary embedded "widgets". @benweet pulled off polished in-place formatting in StackEdit (and on top of contenteditable but that's way harder...
[+] [-] an6n|10 years ago|reply
I've been looking for an application setup with what I could write my personal (research) journal using vim with markdown annotation and with embedded multimedia (screencaptures, mostly). It would be great to have a possibility to attach files to notes, too.
Of course I would like the setup to be open source. Does anyone have similar needs and perhaps solutions for them? I tried atom with vim-bindings-plugin and markdown-preview but somehow the UI just didn't cut it for me when compared to a native vim.
Please, share your setup if you have anything that resembles my need!
[+] [-] jaz303|10 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/no-silo/stash-design, https://github.com/no-silo/stash-server
[+] [-] dimatura|10 years ago|reply
vim notes is very good at quickly jotting down and bringing up things from vim; much better than vim-wiki, in my experience. While it can export to html, since the main interface is vim it is not that nice for embedding images and such. Therefore I use vim notes mostly for stuff related to coding, which is naturally text-friendly.
For research notes and results, I've been using zim-wiki. While it has a GUI, it is a text-based format. Whenever I feel the need for vim shortcuts I just open the page in an external editor (vim), which is even supported in the GUI. The markup is not markdown but something similar to mediawiki, which is annoying but not a deal breaker. It can embed images, tables and latex equations (though the UI for this could be better; instead of a directly using $$ in the markup, there's a dialog). Since you mention screenshots, it also has a "embed screenshot" plugin which I've been using a lot more than I thought I would. It's also open source and has what seems like a healthy community.
[+] [-] roderickm|10 years ago|reply
I tried http://Marxi.co, the so-called "missing Markdown editor for Evernote," but had enough syncing issues during the brief ten-day trial to put me off purchasing a subscription.
There's also a Sublime plugin that offers two-way Markdown conversion into Evernote, but I only have Sublime as a native app, not on mobile or web. https://github.com/timlockridge/SublimeEvernote
Perhaps with Evernote's renewed focus on core product, they'll take a look at improving the experience of the text editor.
[+] [-] gnuvince|10 years ago|reply
1. It's really easy to move things around. Moving a section up or down, re-ordering lists, etc. is done with very simple keyboard shortcuts.
2. You can embed source code in your document and you can also execute it and have the result inserted inside the document. This is great if you are describing a piece of code and you want to give examples.
3. Editing tables in org-mode is very easy and very nice.
[+] [-] hyyypr|10 years ago|reply
I edit mainly using the web interface, but you can also edit the "tiddlers" (each note) using any text editor. The note has it's metadata at the beginning of the file.
I think I'm only using a very small % of TW's capabilities, but it feels like a very powerful tool.
1: http://tiddlywiki.com/
[+] [-] k2enemy|10 years ago|reply
On a mac, VooDooPad fits the bill but it is not open source and its future looks murky. If it were open source with an active community of users I think I would use it.
This has kept me on vimwiki with .md extensions so that vim will at least do syntax highlighting for markdown. You can easily link to local multimedia files, but they don't display inline. As a bonus, a diary entry for the day is just <leader>w<leader>w away.
[+] [-] realo|10 years ago|reply
If you were willing to trade markdown for asciidoc (same goal, different execution), then a combination of asciidoc in vim simultaneously with the asciidoc previewed in google chrome could be a good approximation of what you want. Embedded images work quite well because you can easily specify the final width you want the image to take, on the page... for example. Finally, you can easily produce a pdf with 'a2x'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/asciidoctorjs-live...
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/a2x.1.html
Also, this page is interesting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_...
[+] [-] e12e|10 years ago|reply
Are you asking for a WYSIWIG editor (one that shows you markdown and/or rendered html and pictures), or are you asking for a workflow where you dump some images in a folder and edit post.md, and link to images with markdown tags?
I don't (yet) actually need/use a blog - but just to see what I might be able to recommend others that ask, I had a look for stuff that works with github pages, and found Jekyll Now: https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now
I wouldn't say it's a great work-flow (there are gnarly bits with Jekyll, with using git, with hosting on github, with tweaking the themes...) -- but overall the out-of-box experience is good. It's not a WYSIWYG-happy-blog type situation, but it is a sane-defaults, not that-hard-if-you're prepared to install some things -- and crucially, it can run in a local "serve" mode that watches the filesystem for changes and gives a near-live preview:
I should note that "jekyll serve" is part of standard jekyll; so you don't have to use "Jekyll Now" by any means.[edit: I should probably add that what I've actually been using myself lately is just IPython (for solving assignments in basic calculus and statistics). Sadly doesn't work with the "It's all text!"-plugin/external editor for vimperator as it doesn't use "plain" input-fields -- so if you do "real" writing, rather than just some code (and graphs generated from said code), you'll probably be better off with something more focused on the Markdown part, like Jekyll]
[+] [-] black_knight|10 years ago|reply
Maybe you could use write markdown and convert to HTML5 using Pandoc? Your multimedia could be included with some embedded HTML. If you automate the compilation process suitably, you can have your journal open in your browser while writing in Vim, and see the result almost real-time.
[0] http://pandoc.org/
[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/mk
[+] [-] workbin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pomber|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/gollum/gollum
[+] [-] Mimick|10 years ago|reply
Hope to see more of this as application and not as web apps, I really don't like this new web apps trend.
[+] [-] bachmeier|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I'm the target audience (would be hard to justify spending $5/month given my current workflow) but it would be an excellent way to collaborate. If it could handle really large documents, including organizing them into sections, this would be an outstanding tool for commenting on a student's dissertation (in particular, using a tablet).
[+] [-] ateevchopra|10 years ago|reply
I will use if for some time and see if it can replace my evernote too.
[+] [-] vbsteven|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hnatt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|10 years ago|reply
I love Quiver, but syncing it across multiple computers through iCloud is not reliable, otherwise it would practically be perfect.
StackEdit is great, but I don't like how it's tied to a browser. I also don't like being forced to store everything on an external server. I'm willing to make an exception for iCloud because it's so damn convenient -- it's the only form of cloud storage that I use for personal documents.
From reading this thread, I see that Classeur is from the same creator, which is great news :)
Unfortunately, there's no desktop client yet, so it'd be nice to use something else until then.
I currently store markdown (general insensitive documentation that doesn't need to be kept local) and Ruby/Objective-C files (for snippets/examples) on iCloud and read/edit/run them with Textmate.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|10 years ago|reply
The top menu fails to work when in full-screen browser mode (on chrome) because the "you've gone fullscreen" popup blocks access to the top menu.
[+] [-] renke1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] singhrac|10 years ago|reply
Not to nitpick, but did anyone else find that some (important) keyboard shortcuts were missing? Ctrl/Alt-Backspace in particular didn't work for me. Though I guess vim doesn't have support for that either.
[+] [-] alkonaut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|10 years ago|reply
Non-standard markdown but a welcome decision.
Numbered lists with gaps and line breaks are still impossible sadly. I'll see if my other personal pet gripes against Markdown are handled any differently when I remember what they are.
Admittedly Word and many other wysiwyg editors are sometimes less than helpful in this area but at least it's possible without resorting to tricks such as using double-dots to defeat the auto-formatting.
[+] [-] jdbernard|10 years ago|reply
And that's why I don't like it. I want to be able to wrap the source without forcing the output to wrap too. Totally a preference thing. Wish there was a way to change it according to your preference.
[+] [-] himhckr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrmondo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n8m|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ewillbefull|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roobine|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visakanv|10 years ago|reply