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Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

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Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#51

Post by stephenr »

ggambetta wrote: post #6

Does it support a 400k* word text file without slowing down to a crawl (i.e. a 5-10 second lag between a keypress and a change)? I've tried many markdown editors for my novel, and sadly most editors fail this very basic test :( * Edit: I misread the output of wc. The novel is ~70k words, ~400k characters. Leaving the 400k figure above because of the discussion that follows, because it should still be a reasonable use…

As a little experiment of your question (using the original figure actually) I repeated a dozen or so ~lines~ paragraphs of Lipsum... a lot, until I ended up with a text file with a little over 17K lines... 532K words... and either 3.1M or 3.6M characters, depending whether you count spaces.

MacDown (a native MarkDown editor for macOS) opens it in a snap, has no lag editing, and even the rendered preview (which scrolls with the editor side) has no lag. Memory usage was about 150MB.

For shits and giggles I then pasted that content into the OP's linked tool.. The Safari process for that tab is still sitting at 100% CPU a minute or so later, and is unresponsive.

Is this example a bit ridiculous? Sure. But it demonstrates the difference between a native app - oh, and the process for that tab just disappeared because Safari killed it - and trying to make an app in a web browser.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#52

Post by hnarn »

ggambetta wrote: post #48
hnarn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you spend ten seconds googling whether there was a vim plug in that could do that for you? I did and I found this: https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown

Thanks. That's nice, but not exactly what I meant. By WYSIWYG editing I mean visual editing like Word or Google Docs, but saving Markdown; not typing Markdown and having a real-time preview separately. Typora does this nicely; I type an asterisk, it looks like an asterisk, but when I close the asterisk, the text in between goes italic. The asterisks are hidden unless the cursor is within the italic part. I can double…

I realize this is a matter of personal preference but for me, using editors that are changing the text I write as I write it between code and markup is really annoying. I can buy using pure WYSIWYG (i.e. Word) or typing plaintext, but something is just off for me when the editor tries to do both. I prefer knowing whether what I'm looking at is the actual contents of the file or just a representation of them, but whatever floats your boat obviously. Since a terminal based editor will never be able to to what you require it to, unfortunately this means your selection for "optimized" editors is limited.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#53

Post by weeksie »

enriquto wrote: post #20
weeksie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's untrue. Novels are usually in the 90-110k range, depending on genre. If you're an established author, especially in fantasy or sci fi, insane doorstoppers like that do occur, but 400k is an outlier even for sff.

Here you have a list of very famous books with their word counts. Quite a few of them have more than half a million words. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that a text editor is able to handle that size. After all this is a tiny amount of data compared to what has to deal a program that does image or video processing, so there's 0 reason for a text editor to be "laggy" when dealing with just a few megabytes. https://…

That doesn't exactly make your point.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#54

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

enriquto wrote: post #25
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books should not be written in a single text file, though. That is asking for trouble.

Why not? Beacuse of bad text editors? Or is there some fundamental reason about that?

Because it is extremely hard to work with it?

Same reason why we do not put programs in a single source file.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#55

Post by weeksie »

enriquto wrote: post #20
weeksie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's untrue. Novels are usually in the 90-110k range, depending on genre. If you're an established author, especially in fantasy or sci fi, insane doorstoppers like that do occur, but 400k is an outlier even for sff.

Here you have a list of very famous books with their word counts. Quite a few of them have more than half a million words. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that a text editor is able to handle that size. After all this is a tiny amount of data compared to what has to deal a program that does image or video processing, so there's 0 reason for a text editor to be "laggy" when dealing with just a few megabytes. https://…

Seriously, that’s stupid. You’re collecting outliers. Unpublished writers trying to hawk 400k word novels are for the most part delusional. Every single piece in your list that goes into that territory is something written by an established author.

Though, to be fair, an author organizing a work of that size in a single markdown document has bigger problems than key lag.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#56

Post by dang »

hnarn wrote: post #30
ggambetta wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did for a long time. It doesn't do WYSIWYG markdown, so I've switched to something that does (Typora).

Did you spend ten seconds googling whether there was a vim plug in that could do that for you? I did and I found this: https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown

> Did you spend ten seconds googling

Please don't be a jerk in comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#57

Post by gramakri »

eipi-1 wrote: post #15

I use a self-hosted HackMD (now CodiMD) [1] instance for this. The hosted version pushes more and more towards account creation but you can start without account by visiting [2] directly. They have real time collaboration and a long list of additional plugins [3] that allow all kinds of nice collaboration use cases. For example it is possible to convert some bullet points into a presentation with minimal effort. What…

Try this repo instead - https://github.com/codimd/server . For those wondering about the conflicting repo names, we wrote a blog about it a while ago at https://cloudron.io/blog/2020-01-07-opensource-alternatives-... (see the codimd section)

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#58

Post by type0 »

t0astbread wrote: post #18
enriquto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. This is a quite typical size of a book. Typically novels have about 100 thousand words, but four times that size is not at all uncommon.

In the context of a book, yes. But I mean in the context of an online Markdown editor. (Or even a Markdown editor at all. Can you actually write books in Markdown?)

Rust book is written in Md https://github.com/rust-lang/book as well as plenty other books that I can't remember from the back of my head.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#59

Post by avhon1 »

gravitas wrote: post #44

Dillinger is my online Markdown editor of choice, having a look between the two it's far beyond this solution in features. https://dillinger.io/ https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger

Does Dillinger support collaborative editing (like Google Docs)? I feel like that is major feature of the parent product.

Re: Show HN: Write.md – a shareable distraction-free Markdown editor

#60

Post by GordonS »

sandGorgon wrote: post #24

is there something similar for AsciiDoc ? AsciiDoc is a standardized format that's just as simple as MD. But far more features. Have been looking for something that lets us author asciidoc documents, but markdown (with varying standards) seems far more popular. some of these end up as not being Github compatible or whatever. FYI - asciidoc (.adoc) files are rendered by Github. https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoct…

I like AsciiDocFx, and have used it for editing quite large AsciiDoc files. The preview function works really well too - highly recommended it!

https://asciidocfx.com

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