Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I would suggest you make a proposal to WriteMonkey's developer for
a relevant plugin.

Thanks, Alexander, good idea! I will do that.

Dr Andus wrote:

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
> I would suggest you make a proposal to WriteMonkey's developer for
>a relevant plugin.
Thanks, Alexander, good idea! I will do that.

I've also posted a request to the developer of DesktopCoral, as with a DC solution, the text banner would be permanently available on the desktop, even when WM is not running (though maybe WM could also have that as an option, even when it's minimised to the taskbar):

http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=36464.0

Dr Andus wrote:

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
> I would suggest you make a proposal to WriteMonkey's developer for
>a relevant plugin.

It turns out WM's developer is way ahead of the curve: he's already got a plugin for that. It's called Corkboards, and you can position its card anywhere, make it any rectangular shape, and any colour. How cool is that?

Here is his screenshot of replicating my setup with WM alone:
http://drandus.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/minimal_desktop3.jpg

Brilliantly cool :-) I haven't even tried half of the plugins as yet, but I am impressed each time!

In the interests of cranky Luddites the world over, I have to take issue with WriteMonkey's claim that it "frees you from your computer and all its distractions."

How can that be true if WriteMonkey RUNS ON YOUR COMPUTER? When you're using WriteMonkey, you're still using your computer! You're not free of it at all!

There's only one way to really get free from your computer and all its distractions and that's to stop using computers, at least for writing.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I am sure that there are utilities enabling you to display "ghost text"
which is not influenced by anything else, even full screen views.

You're right. I've just managed to figure out how to do that with Samurize (http://www.samurize.com/modules/news/ which works well in combination with DesktopCoral.

In a nutshell, now I have my research question displayed in a narrow banner stretching across the entire width of my screen at all times, whether any windows are maximised or in full-screen view, including WriteMonkey and Scrivener. I set the banner the exact same colour of grey as WM and Scrivener, so it blends in.

The advantage of this over WM's plugin is that it is always visible, not only when WM is running.

Finally I got around to installing the latest v. of WriteMonkey (2.7.0.3) and some of the latest plug-ins (and some older ones). As expected, the new plug-ins are brilliant. Favourites:

PREVIEW (NEW) - live preview and template picker for markdown, textile or wiki texts. Can be dragged around to other monitors, which is great.

EASY JUMPS - [a table of contents for the markdown headings] - a lot more compact than the old JUMPS and works more consistently (the old one was a bit temperamental on my system).

MAP JUMP - [this is an old one but haven't tried it before] allows you to see a zoomed out version of the text and then jump back to a specific location.

WriteMonkey has been my main writing tool for some time (more recently in a portrait mode monitor, which works even better for me). It also works well with Dragon dictation.

Dr. Andus

Long ago (Sep 28, 2013 at 10:46 PM) you had a post in this thread regarding LyX. I am a very big fan of LyX and in that spirit I contributed some code to Fletcher Penney's MultiMarkdown (http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ that allows MultiMarkdown to convert markdown files (including the extensions provided by MultiMarkdown) directly to LyX files.

Such a solution would get you from markdown to LyX without having to learn all of the LaTeX details. MultiMarkdown can go directly to LaTeX as well - without the LyX step if you would prefer.

Some of the MultiMarkdown additions may be more useful for academic writing than vanilla Markdown.

Charles

I've gotten intrigued by markdown editors, and WriteMonkey has a great reputation. Does it have a plugin for code folding?

jaslar wrote:

I've gotten intrigued by markdown editors, and WriteMonkey has a great
reputation. Does it have a plugin for code folding?

I don't think so. But I wouldn't consider WM to be a markdown editor. It's a distraction-free writing software that also uses Markdown. The focus is on the writing process (fiction, non-fiction etc.) rather than on creating or editing text in Markdown.

CRC wrote:

Such a solution would get you from markdown to LyX without having to
learn all of the LaTeX details. MultiMarkdown can go directly to LaTeX
as well - without the LyX step if you would prefer.

Charles, thanks for the reminder. For my current project I'll just have to stick it out with MS Word as the typesetter for practical reasons (no time to learn LyX), but in the future I'll like to look into the WriteMonkey + LyX workflow.

Enabling of plugins in WriteMonkey requires a donation to the developers; this would be my first donation of this kind. How much would be recommended ? I don't want to look like a mean man but the donation is in Euros!

Marcos D. wrote:

Enabling of plugins in WriteMonkey requires a donation to the
developers; this would be my first donation of this kind. How much would
be recommended ?

It's hard to come up with any rules for this. It depends on what you can afford (which can vary greatly from country to country, and from person to person) and how much you'd be willing to pay for it if it wasn't free, and how much you think this might be worth to you (i.e. how often you think you'd end up using it). Just a few ways to come up with a figure... You can also donate again, later, if you find it particularly useful and want to support the developer. I use WM almost daily, so I certainly feel good about having supported this developer.

Here is a screenshot for the forthcoming v. 3 of WriteMonkey. It looks like it is for the Mac version:

https://goo.gl/gjsgo1

It also looks like it has folding, inline comments, some other kind of markup there, but the biggest change (aside from being a Mac version) is the "explorer" panes for projects and files, which also display word counts per file, which is very nice if you're working on a big project with multiple chapters in individual files.

Echoes of Ulysses III?

Hugh wrote:

Echoes of Ulysses III?

I'm not familiar with Ulysses, so I don't know how it compares with WriteMonkey, but on the WM forum some Ulysses users said they were missing WM on Mac, so I'm hoping that v. 3 will be a best of both worlds for both Windows and Mac users.

Dr Andus wrote:

Here is a screenshot for the forthcoming v. 3 of WriteMonkey. It looks
like it is for the Mac version:

https://goo.gl/gjsgo1

It also looks like it has folding, inline comments, some other kind of
markup there, but the biggest change (aside from being a Mac version) is
the "explorer" panes for projects and files, which also display word
counts per file, which is very nice if you're working on a big project
with multiple chapters in individual files.

Damn that looks good. Hopefully it really is released before the end of the year.

Wait, where is there reference to a Mac version?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Writemonkey, and would love to use it on Mac even though there are similar tools now (Ulysses, Lightpaper).

Dr Andus wrote:

Here is a screenshot for the forthcoming v. 3 of WriteMonkey. It looks
like it is for the Mac version:

https://goo.gl/gjsgo1

It also looks like it has folding, inline comments, some other kind of
markup there, but the biggest change (aside from being a Mac version) is
the "explorer" panes for projects and files, which also display word
counts per file, which is very nice if you're working on a big project
with multiple chapters in individual files.

steveylang wrote:

Wait, where is there reference to a Mac version?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Writemonkey, and would love to use it
on Mac even though there are similar tools now (Ulysses, Lightpaper).

All of the currently available screenshots of v3 appear to be running on a Mac.

steveylang wrote:

Wait, where is there reference to a Mac version?

The developer mentioned it on the WM forum. Here is the quote:

"The reason there has been no update for a while is that I am working on a new version that will be a complete rewrite. There are many reasons for that but the most important one is making wm also available on OSX and Linux. There is no public beta yet, but I hope to make it available by the end of the year. The new wm will target the same market (text based distraction free writing) but it will be different - I'll take the best parts from wm2 and add some new, modern and in my opinion exiting tools for writers. (...) That said, I still intend to support wm2 in the form of bug fixes and new plugins."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/writemonkey/9BmJjzBg9Ig

Thank you!!! That is wonderful news, for awhile his stance was no Mac version was coming, period.

Dr Andus wrote:

steveylang wrote:
>Wait, where is there reference to a Mac version?

The developer mentioned it on the WM forum. Here is the quote:

"The reason there has been no update for a while is that I am working on
a new version that will be a complete rewrite. There are many reasons
for that but the most important one is making wm also available on OSX
and Linux. There is no public beta yet, but I hope to make it available
by the end of the year. The new wm will target the same market (text
based distraction free writing) but it will be different - I'll take the
best parts from wm2 and add some new, modern and in my opinion exiting
tools for writers. (...) That said, I still intend to support wm2 in the
form of bug fixes and new plugins."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/writemonkey/9BmJjzBg9Ig

Here is a screenshot that shows there is indeed folding in the forthcoming version of WriteMonkey:

https://mobile.twitter.com/writemonkey/media/grid?idx=0&tid=675830610762571776

Its going to be good stuff, but still Writemonkey.

I am hoping to see folding and collapsing, I really want to be able to work outliner-style with plain text documents.

There's a new screenshot showing document metadata and markdown tasks-
https://twitter.com/writemonkey/status/683025575469002752

He just replied my tweet, indeed there will be both folding and collapsing.

steveylang wrote:

I am hoping to see folding and collapsing, I really want to be able to
work outliner-style with plain text documents.