the perfect markdown editor

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 7, 2015 at 07:37 PM

jaslar wrote:
>I notice that many of these things do seem to fit into programming
>editors.

I’m not convinced that there needs to be one perfect markdown editor, as people might want to use them for rather different purposes, which then necessitates different fuctionalities. For instance, many of the early markdown editors focused on the needs of people who write for blogs, and therefore the preview pane was important for them, and in some cases it was not even possible to hide the preview pane.

I use markdown mostly for pinning down some formatting decisions in long texts (headings, italics, bold, and block quotes), and so for me distraction-free writing is more important (and a permanent preview pane, changing as you type, is distracting). I have no need for inserting hyperlinks or images. Hence WriteMonkey is perfect for my purposes.

My other use is editing of long texts, where CriticMarkup is needed, and SmartDown seems to be the only one that can handle that (on Win at least).

So I’m suggesting that there might be a case for several types of Markdown editors: some for writing and editing blog posts, others for more heavy-duty programmer-type editing for web pages (such as text editors), and others for distraction-free writing and subsequent CriticMarkup editing.

What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t like WriteMonkey and SmartDown to end up looking like programmer’s text editors or your typical baked-in dual plane editors for blog writing, as they would undermine the writing experience in which the former excel.