I use gedit for most of my text editing, but markdown support is very limited.

Things I’ve tried:

  • vscode, too heavy and intrusive
  • Google docs, only renders, doesn’t show the plain text, need to manually export to see markdown
  • Eclipse, haven’t actually tried markdown, but I have no doubt that it’s supported, but heavier than anything else
  • atom, no longer developed last time I checked
  • online editor, don’t want to share my text and functionality is poor
  • type markdown, save it and render with pandoc, lots of effort, but the results are good

Over to you.

Edit: Had some issues with my Lemmy client, moved to Voyager and hopefully I can fix things.

I was asked what functionality I require, which to be fair, I hadn’t considered because I use my editor for pretty much everything.

Ideally I’d be able to use it to either see the raw markdown or the rendered version of whatever I’m writing, code in a dozen languages, articles, websites, legal documents, books, all of which I do pretty regularly.

The side-by-side view doesn’t do it for me, I’d more likely than not have multiple windows open with different documents instead.

It should do autocomplete, syntax highlighting, bracket closing, live spell checking in a variety of languages, launch quickly, be rock solid when faced with a massive log file and allow me to add menu-items to run bash scripts that do things like calculate the time it would take me to read out the text at my normal podcast reading voice or covert weird characters into html-entities.

There have been many wonderful suggestions, most of them do the preview side-by-side which pretty much eliminates them as a candidate.

There are many suggestions to use a vscode floss version, but the biggest issue with vscode is its weight and I’m not sure if it changes by moving to the floss version. I note that my search for that tool brought me many AI features, which is why I did a hard pass and why I can’t remember its name ATM. (Edit: Codium)

I’ve been using Debian since 1999 and still struggle with remembering the vi control codes, so emacs is unlikely to get in the door.

So, with that in mind, whadayagot?

  • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Since you mentioned VSCode. I wanted to bring up VSCodium. It’s a fork of VSCode with no telemetry. Yes, it’s a full fledged IDE, and probably too much if you just want to markdown editor, but I use it for much more than that, and I think it’s great.

  • thevoidzero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    You said you can type in markdown, convert it to PDF with pandoc and you like the results.

    Now all you need is an editor that can open two file side by side (anything works here, I use emacs), and needs to auto reload PDF on file change. And a tool that can run your configured command each time markdown file changes (I have my own program for this, but it’s a simple bash script as well if you want to write).

    Now with those two all you do is write in markdown and every time you save it the command will run, get the pdf and it’ll reload the pdf. Even if you don’t have the same program to open text and PDF you can just use two with split screen.

  • jamesbunagna@discuss.onlineEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    My all-time personal favorite is probably MarkText. I’m actually surprised no one else has mentioned it; knowing it has garnered almost 50k stars on GitHub.

    I really like it for its realtime preview and support for mathematical expressions. Though, it’s wonderfully feature-rich; so please check out its README for the full list.

    Unfortunately, it (currently) doesn’t enjoy as much development as it previouslu did. Which has ultimately led me to pivot to ghostwriter more recently.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    8·
    9 hours ago

    There are a few good ones I can recommend, depending on what experience are you looking for (programmer, writer, simple note-taking).

    Apostrophe would be the first, better for freestyle writing IMO; and then in no particular order I’d recommend Formiko which seems to work wonders for technical / programming-related writing, Remarkable and Ghostwriter for that no items, text only, final desktop kind of experience. Most or all of these should be findable in software stores like Flatpak, too.

  • dbkblk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    9 hours ago

    Obsidian, it’s not open-source, but it’s not locking you down, and it’s exceptionnally well written.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    51·
    8 hours ago

    Emacs’s Markdown mode has two options for preview:

    • C-c C-c p (Control-C Control-C p) runs markdown-preview, which will open a preview in a new window

    • C-c C-c l runs markdown-live-preview mode, which will show an updated-as you edit preview next to the text.

    In addition to built-in functionality, in my emacs setup, I also personally bind C-c a k to run Make. In my init.el:

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-c a k") 'compile)

    That way, if you have any sort of project – which could hypothetically be a Markdown file – and a Makefile for it in the same directory, it’ll build it. An example Makefile:

    all: foo.pdf

%.pdf: %.md
	pandoc -f markdown -t pdf $< -o $@

    Editing foo.md in emacs and hitting C-c a k will regenerate the pdf using pandoc with that setup. It sounds like you’re familiar with pandoc.

    If you have evince running on foo.pdf, it’ll monitor changes to the displayed pdf file, and then just update its display if the file changes.

  • mortalic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Codium with a markdown plugin gives both edit and preview with syntax highlighting. Add in Genie extension with a chatgpt api key and you can really do some cool stuff

    • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioOPEnglish
      1·
      8 hours ago

      Had a quick look for glow but couldn’t find it. I didn’t know about pulsar. Is it more stable than atom, which managed to fall over when ever I looked at it sideways, a bit like the ZX80 keyboard which would cause a reboot if you dared to think about touching it, that said, reboot was much faster than atom starting up. Does pulsar take the same absurd amount of time?