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Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

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Re: Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

#42

Post by thearn4 »

drew-y wrote: post #16

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

Interesting - is the idea behind free markdown desktop editing with PDF export to basically replace traditional document editors like Word or Open/Libre Office?

I'm used to thinking about markdown as just a tool for lazy people (like me) to get basic HTML formatting. Particularly for Github READMEs, and the like. LaTeX is the document preparation system that I really use (largely because of publication expectations, but I'm also pretty comfy with it at this point). The learning curve is steep.

Re: Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

#43

Post by zubspace »

omegote wrote: post #11

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.

Give haroopad a try. It's a very young project, but it works quite well. The editor and live preview are side-by-side:

http://pad.haroopress.com/

What makes markdown annoying for me are the different flavours of markdown. Github is different from Mediawiki is different from... and so on. I find myself constantly looking up syntax just to be sure I wrote it correctly..

Re: Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

#48

Post by stdbrouw »

biggest_lou wrote: post #37
stdbrouw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

#49

Post by drew-y »

thearn4 wrote: post #42
drew-y wrote: post #16

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

Interesting - is the idea behind free markdown desktop editing with PDF export to basically replace traditional document editors like Word or Open/Libre Office? I'm used to thinking about markdown as just a tool for lazy people (like me) to get basic HTML formatting. Particularly for Github READMEs, and the like. LaTeX is the document preparation system that I really use (largely because of publication expectations,…

For me markdown is easier and quicker to use than WYSISWYG editors. Combined with styling from CSS you can make some really nice looking documents from it. If I where able to export to pdf I'd definitely use it instead of word.

Re: Show HN: Caret – Better Markdown Editor for the Desktop

#50

Post by 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.

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