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

writemd.xyz

11–20 of 73 posts

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

#11

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…

Is a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?

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.

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

#12

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…

At 20 words per line, that is 20k lines... why are you editing everything in a single file?

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

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?

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.

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

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

#14

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…

Why can't you edit it with some fraction at a time?

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

#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 does Write.md provide compared to HackMD? Not affiliated with HackMD, just a happy user and always curious about alternatives.

[1] https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd [2] https://hackmd.io/new [3] https://hackmd.io/features

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

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?

No, the "very basic test" is not having a 10 second latency in a text editor. Come on, this was a solved problem in the 90s.

If it was a solved problem in the 90s, can't you just use a text editor from the 90s? No need to bash on this project just because it doesn't fulfill your use case.

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

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?

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.

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.

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

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 400 thousand word text file "very basic"?

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?)

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

#19

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…

Use and learn vim. It's been around for ages.

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

#20
post #17

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.

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://blog.fostergrant.co.uk/2017/08/03/word-counts-popula...

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