There must be something fascinating about writing Markdown apps - either it scratches an itch, or AI is really good at creating them. There's a flood of them on r/macapps and similar places.
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It's because it's effectively impossible to make a markdown authoring app that meets everyone's needs, and people tend to be picky about what they want in a writing environment. People have strong preferences about WYSIWYG, flavor of markdown (pandoc/quarto/GFM/etc), theming support, some want notes to be able to link to each other, etc. As an example, I require math notation support for basically everything I write which automatically rules out 90% of markdown editors for me.
All of this, but underlying it I've come to the conclusion that Markdown isn't a good format for a writing environment beyond just simple prose. There's too much left up to the flavour of it and it's got weaknesses.
I've been experimenting with using Markdown (in Typora) in place of Word, but it (and others I've looked at) have zero support for image positioning or sizing, or a way to have different (pre-defined) styles on different tables.
Which is a shame because I like keeping my documents in plain text, in version control and efficiently read by my LLMs. LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) for LaTeX is the closest to what I'm thinking of that I know of, but maybe something exists for Asciidoc or Typst.
I always have a hard time understanding why anyone would want a dedicated markdown editor in the first place.
Obviously I am not the intended audience for them, but for me markdown is a fundamentally plain text format, Make nice looking plain text, and if you keep to certain well known patterns, you get a chance to run it through a typeset engine. Most of the point being the plain text. If the point were the typeset document, I would pick a better language.
As such, the ideal markdown editor is a text editor.
a nice md editor feels good. when all the UI is out of the way it gives a minimalism feel and i start to notice tiny details like 'this font is really soothing' and thats where i imagine i want to put my markdown thoughts in. a pure interface
explorations in minimalism
I suspect it's because there's a flood of people writing / looking at MD docs that never did before and want better tooling than is readily known to exist.
I think we're going to see a lot of dev-related tooling that traditional developers would scratch their head and think... who could this possibly be for, and why would anyone spend time making this...
And it's just because there's an entirely new class of people doing this kind of thing now.
In recent years, I've written two!
I wrote my own wiki to use as a personal knowledge base to replace Dokuwiki because I wanted a simpler Markdown-based solution written in Python. I started it during the pandemic times and all of the code in there to date was written by hand. All of it was pretty easy except the CSS/layout parts which I'm just not very good at. It took months of free time to get it where I wanted.
I also recently created a day-to-day notes and daily planner app that's basically a bunch of markdown notes. I spent about a week of free time defining the problem, setting constraints, and refining with an LLM that wrote almost all of the code for me. I've been using it for months and it's working great.
The wiki uses Markdown because I browse it just as often as I edit and I appreciate some modicum of basic formatting. The daily notes app doesn't really _have_ to use markdown, I've just gotten accustomed to writing Markdown pretty much everywhere.
(These are on github, but I'm not posting the links here because I don't want to or care about promoting them.)
yeah, it's easier to made them now then before.
I've made myself two editors recently:
https://wander.md - WYSIWYG editor that works on mac, iphone and iPad and has semantic versioning backend in.
https://original.me - fully native macOS editor that uses Apple Notes as backend.
those are ver interesting to build, but also way more possible. I think it would have take me years before.
When there is a cost. Please show it on the website. I couldn’t find if for wander.
wander is free.
i will add optional wander-native cloud sync and would probably charge for that.
Probably a lot of both.
Writing is also a deeply personal exercise for many, and I can say from personal experience that the environment I write in, from the room/place I'm in to the color scheme of my editor, really matters sometimes.
I haven't found a need to build my own editor, but I can see how someone else would.
didn't know about that, but when I looked around, most of them were paid and just didn't really scratch the itch. this really starte as a simple editor for writing blog posts
I thought it would compare to iA Writer, but misread
Abashedly raises hand as someone who's also written his own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯