anybody have a favourite lightweight, visually attractive WYSIWYG markdown editor? mainly for composing prose, not executing code I use typora.io but wondering what other options are out there, especially free ones - ThreadSky

mehr.nz • 293 days ago

anybody have a favourite lightweight, visually attractive WYSIWYG markdown editor? mainly for composing prose, not executing code

I use https://typora.io but wondering what other options are out there, especially free ones

Comments

olivia.science•293 days ago

Why do you need WYSIWYG? That's the thing that actually kills it. Because of multiple realisability at the output you'll never get a good mapping or cultivate basic computational thinking. I do get what you mean and want, but why with something as simple as md?

mehr.nz•293 days ago

this is for writing prose, no compute necessary 😂

olivia.science•293 days ago

Markdown is parsed into a document, that's computation. Identical markdown files can be computed into different output documents.

mehr.nz•293 days ago

with the types of manuscripts we write, there's a 1:1 relation between md and output. once doing more than prose we end up in rstudio or vscode, but many of us find those environments aesthetically.....bad. so it's nice to have something pretty to work in up to that point. typora is quite good imo

olivia.science•293 days ago

Is it possible you don't mean WYSIWYG and mean it compiles it in a little window next to the raw text? That also is computed and has infinite output possibilities of course, but not WYSIWYG that's Word. Perhaps you're looking for a WYSIWYM editor? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM

mehr.nz•293 days ago

Check out typora, it's a hybrid of those two acronyms, but the detail isn't really relevant imo (rendering side by side is what many people find unpleasant about working in rmd, tex etc)

jasonmulligan.com•293 days ago

I like IA Writer on macos; it's very simple and nice to use

skyblu.bsky.social•293 days ago

My preferred free writing tool is Joplin. It doesn't look quite as polished as obsidian but it's got multiple theme options, tons of settings, and it's free as in beer.

mehr.nz•293 days ago

Whoa this looks interesting thanks

skyblu.bsky.social•293 days ago

Upsides: multi platform, can run free sync locally, many plug-ins to add functionality.
Downsides: MD isn't native storage format, need to export, not sure if you can run multi user instance.

I find it very useful but it's not perfect for every situation. I've tried others and always come back

skyblu.bsky.social•293 days ago

Potential downside: not sure of "weight" and what you need to use it on. It works well on my desktops, laptops, and Android phones though. I don't recommend doing heavy formatting on Android lol

skyblu.bsky.social•293 days ago

Also upside: forums and reddit are very helpful if you're trying to solve an issue.

jaquent.bsky.social•293 days ago

I am also stuck with typora but I would love to change it.

mehr.nz•293 days ago

I'm not sure I need to change myself, it's more that I want something to recommend to students and I don't want them to each have to pay $15 for a license (I just wrote the devs to see if they can do a site license for my lab, which I think would be worth like $75 or so)

xehsu.lol•293 days ago

I have been using MacDown which works _fine_. I haven’t found anything better that is super lightweight. Main issue is the syntax is slightly different from other apps

mehr.nz•293 days ago

Just came across it this morning actually. It does a weird screen flicker thing on my laptop as it renders but maybe can be fixed

arun-niranjan.bsky.social•293 days ago

Would obsidian fit your criteria?

mehr.nz•293 days ago

Ooh that's a good thought, I have heard good things, probably has more features than my students really want but depending on implementation might work.....

erisianrite.com•293 days ago

Came here to also recommend Obsidian. It will have a bunch of features you don’t want/need (backlinking, publishing to webpages, etc.) but you can always play with them and decide if you want to use them as well in the future. Their same-page WYSIWYG markdown editor is really good.

mehr.nz•293 days ago

I'm not above using software for like 1/10 of what it can do haha
We use Basecamp in my lab purely for kanban

erisianrite.com•293 days ago

lmao I love that

arun-niranjan.bsky.social•293 days ago

My take on obsidian is that it's good but overhyped. Go in with open eyes and a cool head and you'll find a decent tool.

mehr.nz•293 days ago

I haven't really tried it but one of my postdocs loves it!

syzara.bsky.social•293 days ago

is this the thing where Notepad++ is an option?

it's free and very lightweight and does color coding

binaryape.bsky.social•293 days ago

I like IAWriter for writing markdown (it's not free, though) and then use something else to render it

mehr.nz•293 days ago

Have heard good things about this but haven't tried.......will check out thx!

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•125 days ago

I've returned to this ancient thread I had memories of to mention I am having a look at Zettir. It's a stand alone open source markdown editor that it has similar level citation option to r-markdown (works with exported bib file, csl styles). https://docs.zettlr.com/en/core/citations/

mehr.nz•125 days ago

oh wow this looks interesting...... how's it going so far?

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•125 days ago

I've really only confirmed proof of concept, - opened it, done a bit of text, confirmed the referencing worked, and checked the built-in Export as Word, Simple PDF, and Github Markdown options (the ones I care about).

Seems to work fine.

mehr.nz•125 days ago

ah nice. I've been leaning into typora more than I used to and have really enjoyed the visual UX, but it's super minimalist and lacks all the Rmd features etc. wrote this whole paper in typora actually

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/bdpjc

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•124 days ago

My biggest gripe with Zettir is it doesn't use the system spellchecker, so to get NZ English & Māori involved sourcing the open source format dictionaries and doing some extracting and renaming files. But that is a one off configuration issue.
https://bsky.app/profile/thoughtfulnz.bsky.social/post/3l7jlaypspa2l

mehr.nz•124 days ago

Ah not too bad to fix!

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•293 days ago

Not lightweight in memory footprint, but recent versions of RStudio let you toggle between pretty and source views based on markdown drive quarto and markdown documents, and I personally can attest to writing quarto documents with no code in them to use as an editor - eg https://github.com/thoughtfulbloke/letter2ed

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•293 days ago

and with that project I used Zotero as a reference manager with it

mehr.nz•293 days ago

yea we use Rstudio once manuscripts have enough code to make it worthwhile, but it's really clunky, not terribly nice aesthetically, and last I tried it the preview mode was pretty unstable (i.e., scary re potential to lose text). maybe it's improved since then tho

joshdeleeuw.bsky.social•293 days ago

Not quite as beautiful, but a vscode extension can transform the editor: e.g. https://github.com/zaaack/vscode-markdown-editor

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