Live data from Hacker News

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

writemd.xyz

61–70 of 73 posts

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

#61

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…

Doesn't seem to be the case, unless you want to run something based on vscode online which could work.

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

#62

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 scrol…

I really like MacDown but it has this weird bug of sometimes hanging for up to 30 seconds with a spinning beach ball and then continuing as if nothing happened.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edited with the corrected math. It's ~3.5k lines, ~70k words, ~400k characters. Still, why wouldn't I want to edit it as a single file?

> why wouldn't I want to edit it as a single file? > ...without slowing down to a crawl (i.e. a 5-10 second lag between a keypress and a change)? I think you answered your own question. :P Also, you can edit chapter 53 without having to scroll down to line 130,465. Basically, the same reasons bills are split up

When doing largescale editing changes, I much prefer the single file approach.

Things like:

+ Changing the age of a character

+ Changing the argument order for a particular function

Those aren't simple find/replace solutions that you can run across files.

You can do the same thing with multiple files, but it's slower and can be harder to hold a context in your head.

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

#64

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…

I was curious about how my text editor (http://github.com/alefore/edge) would fare here. I decided to try it with a file with 400k lines, each with ~5 or so words. It worked reasonably well: https://asciinema.org/a/cTMmQMhqLcIQrDbkqx3JFpFUn

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it extremely hard to work with the whole novel in a single file? Because most software for writing prose is not up to the task?

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

#68

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.

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

A good editor can handle them without any trouble. I just downloaded Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg and opened it in Emacs. It opened instantly, I could immediately go the end (line 22333), scroll around, count the words (there are around 222617), count the ocurrences of the word 'whether' (there are 91, the last of which is on line 21769), make a change somewhere in the middle. All of this is instant.

You can do all that instantly in Vim too (... and I just checked to make sure). A megabyte of text is just not a lot of text for a good editor.

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

#70
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)

Question if I may: which one would you recommend, the HackMD version or the community fork, and why? Both seem to be actively maintained and interfaces look close enough (other than template buttons and nudges towards signing in upon opening a new document in the company version).
Post reply on HN