I use geditfor 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.
I have no idea what that’s a screenshot of.
What do other headings, tables and footnotes look like?
If it’s just more colours, that doesn’t help me.
First, lol
Second, that looks like Kate. It’s the stock text editor on KDE.
Name of the app is kate. It only does light formating and syntax highlight. Are you looking specifically for markdown editor that just doesn’t hide markup? From the list you gave my understanding was that you are looking for higlight and that’s ± it. There are multiple markdown specific editors that do it like ghostwriter, retext, or even emacs with markdown-mode (iirc it does rendering without hiding markup, auto-formats tables, makes links clickable, etc.)
I tried editing my post to add this, but Pachli doesn’t want to play at the moment.
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 hrml-entities.
That’ll probably rule out text editors like emacs tf you don’t want side-by-side. Emacs has some functionality that can do some styling, but you probably won’t have a purely WYSIWYG mode for, say, tables. It looks like emacs has some way to translate org-mode tables to Markdown, but that’s probably not quite what you want.
That’ll rule out most “small” programs targeting specifically Markdown.
Depends on what you mean by “massive” log files. If you mean you require out-of-memory editing – the ability to load only a small portion of the document into memory, which is probably going to be necessary once you exceed your machine’s main memory – then you’re looking at a small set of software. Some hex editors, emacs can use
vlf(which will constrain other features available), a few programs targeting specifically this feature.I haven’t looked at heavyweight word processors, but some may have reasonable support for at least many of those, stuff like LibreOffice. They probably won’t open quickly, but there are a few programs capable of speeding up startup by leaving a daemon running, just opening something in that daemon, like
emacs,urxvt, etc. You can possibly do that or just leave a blank document open on another workspace.Unless you are planning to go with emacs route, you have a chance to make it yourself from scratch.
Yeah, I hear you. There are a few other projects in the pipeline.