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Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

classeur.io

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Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#91
post #34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't like this new web apps trend. I think the desktop apps will be probably also web apps... (built with nw.js or electron).

Only the simpler or the worse ones -- trading speed, utility, connection to the OS, etc for ease of development.

It's more like for using the skills they know than ease of development. Web is more common this days that developers fear the working directly with an OS...

Years ago developers used to code websites on languages intended for the OS (tools to make that easier was there) and today we see the opposite.

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#92
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This was quite good. I don't know much about Pandoc but it is mentioned quite a bit ITT. I tried texts app() out and it is a strong offering. Great product and does seem to have an awesome workflow, being quite close to what I want. It is a bit pricey ($29.99) for a note taking app but if it fulfilled your use case, it could be worth it for the boost in your productivity.

> It is a bit pricey ($29.99) for a note taking app

I agree, it is a bit expensive, but I felt it was well worth it; I now use it for literally all of my document processing, technical documentation, personal writing, proposals, literally everything. Because it runs through Pandoc, I can produce amazingly professional looking documents for everything. It's one of my favourite applications by far!

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#93
post #8

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/ben…

I really like that you can write html tags inline. Do you know which "flavor" or extension does this?

original Markdown?

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#94
post #86

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, oth…

I usually use just the plain OSX Notes app. It has added more features that I care for and has some trouble _removing_ styles from stuff, but it works everywhere. If you paste in coloured code then it will keep the colours.

I'd love to use Vesper, but no Mac client makes it a no go.

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#95
post #27

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.

Check out https://wikizen.click. It's a simple markdown Wiki persisted in your Dropbox.

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#96
post #69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) 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?

Looks pretty cool, but I had trouble getting the links to work just using a note title. I'm also looking for something native that will operate on a folder full of text files (for easy backup, syncing, and versioning).

Have you seen http://zim-wiki.org/ ?

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#97

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 w…

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][].

[Qute]: http://www.inkcode.net/qute [Writer Plus]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.easy4u.writ...

Also,

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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...

Re: Classeur.io: Re-enjoy writing, with Markdown

#98
post #15

Dear fellow hackers, 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-bin…

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…

There are some sweet extensions for Atom + pandoc, notably https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline and https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-plus (convert with pandoc, fast & smooth preview update via DOM diffing/patching). See https://discuss.atom.io/t/using-atom-for-academic-writing/19... for more goodies.

With non-Atom (e.g. Vim), https://github.com/yyjhao/markmon does fast DOM-diffing preview (I think it inspired markdown-preview-plus).

Different direction: instead of multimedia inside markdown, consider something that mixes markdown, multimedia and other fragments. I'm specifically thinking IPython or Sage notebook. Not sure it's a win in itself but there are many other benefits for research notes...

Finally, for those comfortable with latex writing, Overleaf in rich text mode is a quite good middle road — not markdown but less noise than raw latex: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81-having-a-hard-time-convinci... (overleaf also has git access for offline)

For math in markdown, https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown lists all tools I'm aware off.

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> I don't need embedded multimedia, but I rather use a lot of Unicode characters for mathematics.

Do you mean you use unicode as poor man's math support, or that you do render via pandoc/mathjax/etc but prefer to have $β^2$ rather than $\beta^2$ in the source? I'm curious, does in-place whole-formula rendering solve your need or do you actually care about unicode symbols in source?

And how would you ideally want to type them? "\be" offering autocompletion to β? http://kasperpeulen.github.io/PressAndHold/ ?

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