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?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    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.

    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.

    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 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.

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

      Not sure if this will reply properly (new Lemmy client), but you made some excellent points.

      I’m loathe to leave an app window open because I don’t want the editor to “help” when I’m wanting to replace text in all open windows and discover that it did so on another workspace. I tend to launch separate instances for each set of files.

      The massive file comment really stems from opening a file without checking every time how big it is and getting locked out of your editor whilst it chokes on a json or xml file with no line breaks. At the time of writing, all I could think of was log files.

      I am beginning to suspect that I’m going to need to use multiple editors and I can’t say that this fills me with joy.