[HN Gopher] GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor ___________________________________________________________________ GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor Author : ekianjo Score : 137 points Date : 2021-02-24 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (wereturtle.github.io) (TXT) w3m dump (wereturtle.github.io) | markosaric wrote: | GhostWriter is amazing! I use it on Linux and write all my posts | with it! | | Simple, minimal, lightweight, has a dark theme. There's a | distraction free mode which basically fades out everything except | for the sentence you are writing. And a Hemingway mode which | disables the delete key :) | | I've gotten used to writing in Markdown since I started using | GhostWriter as it makes that easy. For instance when I type "[" | it automatically adds "]" as well. Worth a try! | bww wrote: | This is great. Non-programming text editors (along with task | management, notes, email, and others) belong to the broad class | of software for which the options available on Linux are | typically extremely unappealing. Especially in contrast to what's | available on other platforms (notably: MacOS). | | Generally, your options on Linux consist of: | | - A couple apps that have been around and remain essentially | unchanged since the '90s, | | - Some recent, well-meaning but poorly executed programs, and | | - A nice-looking but infuriatingly clunky and out-of-place | Electron app which I'm loathe to use on principle. | | I'm very glad to see a first-class Linux app in this category. | captn3m0 wrote: | I've been happy with Notable, which is seeing rapid | development. It went closed-source a while back, but still has | decent linux support. | qbasic_forever wrote: | There are always services like Notion to consider too. Cloud- | based web-app, always available with zero need to install | anything anywhere. Beautiful, mobile and tablet friendly | writing. Move effortlessly between writing the same doc on your | couch, desk, on the go, etc. Share and collaborate effortlessly | with other people. | | A self-hosted open source option here if you can do some basic | web-app setup and maintenance is HedgeDoc. | mr-karan wrote: | Notion is anything but "always available". There's no offline | first mode available as of yet and within last 2 months alone | there have 2-3 incidents of downtime. | bachmeier wrote: | > Non-programming text editors | | That's quite a qualifier you have there - there's no meaningful | distinction between a text editor and a non-programming text | editor. You have older options like Emacs and Vim, newer | options like VS Code and Atom, and a broad array in between | like Geany, Textadept, Kate, Pluma, and on and on. | | In the non-programming text editor category you nonetheless | have things like Joplin, Obsidian, Notable, and Boostnote. And | of course web editors like Evernote, Notion, and Roam, plus | TiddlyWiki, Dokuwiki, PmWiki, and so on in the wiki category. | joelthelion wrote: | Ghostwriter is awesome. I use it frequently and absolutely love | it. | auraham wrote: | I just downloaded it a few minutes ago. Its GUI is clean and | sharp. I am a big fan of Typora. It is my favorite app for taking | notes and todo lists. I think GhostWriter is another good option. | There are a few features I miss from Typora: | | - Creation of tables (CTRL + T) - Export to PDF - A bit of | vertical space between a title (# title) and the next line of | text. - Support for Latex equations | | A few things I like about GhostWriter | | - Support for multiple flavors of Markdown - Export to HTML - | Many themes | aidos wrote: | We've started using Typora at work and my big complaint is that | I can't pay them any money! I've sent them an email about it | (months ago); so far, ignored. | | It's a bit crazy to me. As a business I want to know that the | tools I'm building on are going to survive. Take. My. Money. | purpmint008 wrote: | What do you mean it isn't available for macOS?! | | I am an Apple user -- highest of all classes -- the whole world | is supposed to develop software just for me. | | Oh well, I'll just have to SSH into my *nix box to test/use this. | Raphael wrote: | The cursor is blinking. | galaxyLogic wrote: | I recently discovered I can write great looking browser-ready | documentation easily by simply embedding the whole page in a | single PRE-tag and embedding a very simple style-sheet: | | <style> pre { font-family: Verdana; } </style> | | The reason it took me this long to not use HTML for writing | simple texts I think is that the DEFAULT font for PRE in browsers | looks terrible. | | Whatever else I need are simple tags like <b> <h2>, <h3>, <hr> | and simple hyperlinks. I can omit <html> and <head> and <body> | tags totally it seems. No problem not having them. Just nice | simple MINIMAL MARKUP content-pages. | | But I can easily use the full power of HTML when needed. No need | to rely on non-standard markdown dialects. | | Is there a specific advantage of Markdown I am missing? | qbasic_forever wrote: | Throw a CSS style tag in there pointing to a simple, semantic | HTML & CSS library and you'd be amazed how slick and polished | your page appears--try dropping in MVP.css for example: | https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/ | asutekku wrote: | The advantage is not having to write full html tags for example | for lists (<ul><li>hi<li><ul>), when you can just use a single | - to do the same thing and the text will also look readable on | both pure text and as formatted. | hughes wrote: | If you're wondering, this is unrelated to the Ghost blogging | platform, which uses a different markdown editor. | cercatrova wrote: | Anything different from using VSCode? | fingerlocks wrote: | Would love to try it. Am I overlooking the MacOS binary, do I | have to build it from source? | makeworld wrote: | The README gives instructions. It says it's experimental | though. | | https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter#macos | fingerlocks wrote: | Yeah I read that. Did you? It just says you can download an | Application bundle, but provides no link. | | The only other reference to MacOS anywhere is how to build | from source. | Florin_Andrei wrote: | Ah, dang it. I need something that's cross platform. This | app is nice, but seems too Linux-centric. | | I use Joplin currently, it's kinda ugly, but works on all | platforms including Android, and syncing it via Dropbox is | trivial. | sails wrote: | What is an installation bundle? (tried some of the unix | looking downloads but none seemed appropriate) | stonesweep wrote: | A bundle is basically what you see as an application in | macOS launcher; under the hood, each app is actually a | subdirectory with a bunch of things in it, which presents | as a single-clickable in the GUI. I would interpret this to | mean "manually sudo copy the (app directory) to | /Applications, there is no installer" (download, untar and | copy) | | For the releases, I don't actually see a published tarball | for the bundle (on github) so I'm going to further think | that they mean "...first you have to follow the compile | instructions to create the output bundle (binaries)" - get | Xcode installed, etc. and follow the second macOS readme. | | Better answer on bundles: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS) | sails wrote: | Thanks that made sense. | kartoshechka wrote: | goyo and limelight can provide (less dramatic) distraction-free | experience on vim, and even without searching I'm sure there's | something for previewing Markdown from vim. | ibraheemdev wrote: | Vim displays plaintext, so you cannot use it to preview | markdown as HTML. However, you can use a plugin such as | "markdown-preview" [0] to preview markdown in your browser. | | 0: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim | podiki wrote: | Looks nice! And I don't want to always be that Emacs guy, but for | anyone interested, you can (of course) have a similar setup, | here's some packages: | | https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs (haven't tried, but clean | look and defaults) | | https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti (writing environment) | | https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode (screenplay writing) | | https://github.com/alphapapa/org-sidebar (sidebar) | | https://github.com/jrblevin/markdown-mode (markdown, with preview | too) | | https://orgmode.org/ (of course, org-mode for everything) | beshrkayali wrote: | Olivetti is fantastic, I mostly edit and write text in that | mode, even longish emails. | CarelessExpert wrote: | And I don't wanna be that Vim guy, but similarly a mix of these | plugins works well for me: | | https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim (distraction free mode) | | https://github.com/reedes/vim-pencil (better behaviour for | writing prose) | | https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim (visual highlighting | of current paragraph) | | https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown (better markdown | syntax) | | https://vim-voom.github.io/ (outliner sidebar) | | Edit: | | BTW, for my truly favourite aesthetic experience, I like to | pair this setup with a nice dark theme, a high quality font, | and cool-retro-term (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- | term/) emulating an old school CRT. Is this practical or | ergonomic? Nope! But I love it! | jyrkesh wrote: | It might be blasphemous, but I'd actually love a pretty, | distraction-free Markdown editor like this that supports Vim | keybindings, but isn't Vim. | | Am I just being lazy in learning the Vim plugin system? Are | there pretty Vim frontends now that render all nicely like | Ghostwriter et al? | CarelessExpert wrote: | Well, without knowing what your definition of a "pretty" | frontend is, it's a bit tough to reply. | | Go check out the screenshots for Goyo and Limelight and ask | yourself if it's pretty enough for you. Personally, I think | Vim can look as good as any modern editor with a couple | plugins and a decent theme and font, but we might not have | the same standards. :) | qbasic_forever wrote: | Most dedicated markdown editors all end up using the same | JS code editor components like Ace, CodeMirror or Monaco, | and those editors have great vim keybindings usually as | extensions or options. See if the tool you're using lets | you flip those vim bindings on. For some editors they | expose it as an option and for others you have to hack | around with the source (for example enabling it with | stackedit, a PWA markdown editor like ghostwriter, is | possible with some hacking: | https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/254 ). | podiki wrote: | Haha fair enough! Retro term definitely looks cool. | | (Of course could then use Evil in Emacs for Vim keys, or just | run vim in a terminal inside Emacs...) | CarelessExpert wrote: | Honestly, I've periodically considered heading back to | Emacs-land to see how things have changed. | | I used to be an Emacs user back in the early 2000s but | Emacs pinky hit me something fierce (it's my own fault; I | have poor typing style so I never use the right control, | and I could never adapt to the control-capslock swap) so I | jumped into Vim and never looked back. | | But I gotta admit, Orgmode, among other things, has me | feeling a bit Emacs-curious these days... ;) | qbasic_forever wrote: | Give Doom emacs or Spacemacs a shot too--it's the power | of emacs with an opionated vim style keybinding. They're | really slick in my experience. | elwell wrote: | I've enjoyed using this simple Emacs package: | https://github.com/shime/emacs-livedown | [deleted] | thangalin wrote: | My free and open-source KeenWrite text editor is comparable to | GhostWriter: | | https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite#features | | What sets KeenWrite apart is the ability to use (externally- | defined) variables within the prose, shown in this older demo | video: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8 | | Also, variables work in diagrams, R expressions, and TeX | equations. For example, take a look at the following screenshot: | | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/maste... | | The palette is defined in one spot, allowing colours to be used | by both diagrams and typesetting the final PDF. Further, | character names can be assigned and referenced within both the | prose and diagrams. Also, the variables are interpolated, which | allows variables to be defined in terms of other variables. | | Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable | references? (I looked, but didn't find any, so started developing | my own text editor.) | swirepe wrote: | This is beautiful. Well done. | | >Are there any other text editors that have interpolated | variable references? | | The closest I can think of are Frescobaldi's snippets[1], vim's | `!read`, or spreadsheets. Maybe light table [2]? I haven't seen | anything exactly like what you've made | | [1] https://www.frescobaldi.org/uguide#help_snippet_edit_help | | [2] http://lighttable.com/ | breuleux wrote: | > Are there any other text editors that have interpolated | variable references? | | I made my own markup language a while back that sort of has | that feature | (http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/syntax.html#variables). The | variables can be defined inline or imported from a JSON file or | whatever. It does reparse the whole thing on every change, so | I'm not sure it scales very well. The language should be | amenable to incremental parsing, though, I just haven't had | time to tackle that issue. It's far more extensible and far | better than Markdown IMO, but I suppose I'm biased. | qbasic_forever wrote: | Most people get this kind of logic from their CMS or publishing | platform. Jekyll, hugo, wordpress, 11ty, etc. all have various | external state stores (yaml files, JSON, CSV, calling a graphql | API, etc.) that you can query and interpolate or insert data | into your document using a bevy of different template | languages. Check out Gatsby or even Next.js for something | that's really pushing the boundaries of static + data-driven | content. | e12e wrote: | > Are there any other text editors that have interpolated | variable references? | | Maybe Leo? I'm not sure if it qualifies as a (plain) text | editor, but then maybe neither does keenwrite. | | http://leoeditor.com/ | | Or you could pair markdown with m4 - but I wouldn't really | recommend it. | underseacables wrote: | Another great editor is iA Writer which has a wonderful Focus | Mode and a color scheme that is rather pleasing and easy on the | eyes. | satysin wrote: | Yes iA Writer is great. I love the new Style Check feature. I | don't write much but when I do features like focus mode and | style check really help me output a decent to read document. | | Something I like is that everything is in plain text and it | just uses iCloud for sync rather than trying to do its own | thing. Or you can just use Dropbox or whatever else you want as | it is just text files in a folder which I always prefer over a | database and proprietary syncing solution. | nafizh wrote: | Not available for linux sadly. | pierreyoda wrote: | The iOS version is also great! | r053bud wrote: | Just curious what differentiates this from the dozen others out | there? | | Edit: Open source for one, I would say. | encryptluks2 wrote: | GhostWriter is more basic than others, which some may consider | a good thing. I tried it on Arch for a bit since there is a | package in the official repos. | | I however prefer just using Atom with Markdown Preview Plus. It | has a ton of features built in with sane extensions, or you can | integrate it with Pandoc: | | https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus/blob... | | I'm sure VS Code has something similar, but only from non- | trusted third parties. | schnable wrote: | Anything similar out there for Asciidoc? Currently using the VS | Code plugin. | recklessdemon wrote: | I believe you can use Pandoc with Ghostwriter. Pandoc has | support for Asciidoc. | dschuessler wrote: | Visual Studio Code has a Zen mode (Cmd+K Z) that should at | least give you the distraction freedom of GhostWriter, | regardless of the markup you use. | smusamashah wrote: | This looks great. We have too many markdown editors now BTW and | none of them provide WYSIWYG like Typora. We really need an open | source Typora clone. | svat wrote: | "Mark Text" (https://marktext.app/) seems to be one. | | (HN thread from Nov 2019: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21462832 -- I asked for | other editors like this and got no other answers AFAICT. So | this Mark Text is still the only open-source "WYSIWYG" Markdown | editor I'm aware of.) | msoloviev wrote: | I'm actually working on one | (https://github.com/blackhole89/notekit). It's native | (Gtk+/C++) rather than Electron, too. | throwaway888abc wrote: | Looks very nice, will give it shot over weekend. Curious for | new GTK app and the tree/folder structure is helpful to me. | Thanks! | uneekname wrote: | This looks like the tool I've been looking for, and the | screenshots in your README are beautiful. Thanks for the work | you've done on this, I'm excited to try it out. | digitalsanctum wrote: | +1 for Typora. It's my go to for Markdown editing especially | when I'm authoring tables. I don't mind it being closed source | and it's free. | baby wrote: | What's the point of a WYSIWYG markdown editor? FWIW quip is | one. The only thing I can think of is that if you need to post | something you wrote on a platform that accepts markdown it | makes it easy. But in general I write markdown when I don't | have google doc or quip | qbasic_forever wrote: | It's a mindset change--make writing flow as freely and easily | as typing up a reply in gmail. Think about how many | paragraphs you can bang out quickly getting a point across in | gmail's editor. It doesn't feel like you're authoring content | in a CMS, but if you squint that's really what gmail kind of | is--just a CMS for writing content directed to a small (or | large) set of people through direct e-mail as opposed to | published on a web page. | | You're not in a fancy CMS editor with all these whiz-bang | blocks and components--those are just noise that give you | more anxiety (should I be making this paragraph a hero/lead | element? wait no, what about a side-by-side with a graphic? | oh, but what graphic? ... hrm, time to go waste 30 minutes | looking at unsplash... oh wait, what was I writing again? oh | nevermind, I guess I'll come back to finish this tomorrow | when my head is clear). | | You're not writing content in something that feels like a | programming language filled with special characters, an IDE | yelling at you for every little misplaced indent or space, | etc. | | You're just writing text with some light formatting to | emphasize structure and key elements. Maybe some lists or | bullet points thrown in. A graphic figure or two. It's just | like composing an e-mail, something you've done thousands and | thousands of times already in your life. There's no pomp and | circumstance, no steep learning curve... just writing. | c-smile wrote: | Why it is so big? Download shows 79 Mb of compressed installer. | What's inside? | | My html-notepad (https://html-notepad.com/) (Sciter based) that | allows to edit documents in as WYSIWYG as Markdown forms is just | 2 Mb ( also compressed installer ) - 40 times smaller. | rhn_mk1 wrote: | It seems to come with its own fonts: | https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter/tree/master/resour... | sodality2 wrote: | Less than 200KB each, doubt that's the bulk of it | c-smile wrote: | I suspect that they package whole WebKit for HTML preview | and so it positions Qt not too far from ElectronJS. | baby wrote: | Now do the same for asciidoc as this is what book writers use, | and make it easy to export to epub, and you have a product that | will be used by the next generation of self publishers | Florin_Andrei wrote: | Any Joplin users here? How does this compare to Joplin? (besides | being less supported on different platforms) | stanislavb wrote: | And here it is a summary of the alternatives (there are plenty): | | - Open Source https://www.libhunt.com/r/ghostwriter | | - Commercial https://www.saashub.com/ghostwriter-alternatives | tyingq wrote: | Looks like the Windows support is provided by a third party that | isn't able to produce windows installers past the 1.8.0 version. | I had to search around a bit to find that one, so a direct link | for anyone that wants the 1.8.0 Windows x64 installer package: | | https://github.com/michelolvera/vs-ghostwriter/releases/down... | | He does provide a 7-zip portable binary for 1.8.1+. | | I did download and try it briefly. It has a wordpad-like feel, | pulldowns for bold, italic, indent, lists and so on. Seemed | pretty nice to use. | ducktective wrote: | For anyone wondering, no, _not_ Electron this time! It uses QT5 | actually so +1 there. | | (Sad to see the state of desktop GUI has come to this...) | ghostbrainalpha wrote: | Is Electron falling out of favor? | | It's been next on my "to learn" list for way way too long. | ngokevin wrote: | It's a great dev experience, and lets you build desktop | applications to users fast. Some purists on HN may jab at it | because they know the internals that it ships a whole browser | engine, and resource and performance-wise is not optimal. | It'll be the similar crowd of people who shun JS frameworks | for vanilla JS. | bayindirh wrote: | No, Electron is not falling out of favor, but there's a | strong opposition for it from some parties, which I'm a | member of. | | Make no mistake, Electron is awesome stuff, but it consumes | too much memory and processing power for what it can do. | | Atom, the poster child of Electron uses as much RAM as | Eclipse and can't do 10% of a stock Eclipse installation. | When I left it, Atom was unable to open large files, do lazy | loading or similar simple stuff. | | Other Electron based software also wastes too much resources | for the functionality it offers. This is where it gets the | most flak. | qbasic_forever wrote: | I'd put up Slack or Discord as the modern exemplars of | Electron apps. As much as I loved Atom it has clearly been | de-prioritized and on the verge of being shelved by GitHub | & Microsoft. Yeah Slack and Discord take a few hundred MB | of memory, but for thousands and thousands of people they | sit there hanging out in their desktops all day every day | with very little fuss. You don't need to install a JVM to | use them, you don't need to worry about keeping it | updated... it just works. Whether you're on linux, mac or | windows... again, it just works. I can walk my parents | through installing and using Slack over the phone--I cannot | do that for nearly any other desktop app. | ducktective wrote: | So you are willing to trade ~1GiB of your RAM and ~5% of | CPU cycles just to be able to send/receive some text | messages? I use those services only in their webapp form | and even then, my laptop grinds to a very noticeable halt | as soon as they are loading in the tab. | | Electron is a nice cross-platform solution until it | isn't. Imagine using VSCode, Discord, Slack, Matrix, | Spotify, some markdown editor and now you have 6 browser | instances chipping away your machine resources...not even | counting the actual browser. | qbasic_forever wrote: | We're living in a world where my 2 year old phone has 8GB | of DDR4 RAM. Even a $150 Chromebook has 4GB. RAM | consumption just isn't a realistic concern anymore for | office and communication work, much like hard drive space | is basically infinite for most people. | Mavvie wrote: | > So you are willing to trade ~1GiB of your RAM and ~5% | of CPU cycles just to be able to send/receive some text | messages? | | Yes. Also, I'm curious, do you find the webapp forms use | measurably less resources than the electron version? I | would've imagined they're pretty close (with Electron | possibly even being lighter than a full browser tab), but | I am not confident and could be completely wrong. | | > Imagine using VSCode, Discord, Slack, Matrix, Spotify, | some markdown editor and now you have 6 browser instances | chipping away your machine resources | | I, and surely tons of others on this forum, am doing this | right now without issue. | | Sure it's not perfect, especially if you're on battery, | but most of the time it just doesn't matter to almost all | of their user base. | ducktective wrote: | The reasoning is, since those are "web"-apps at the core, | I saw no reason to complicate my OS package manager with | a chrome-instance (bar VSCode). The whole install-use- | update could be replaced by opening a tab. I've used | Postman as a desktop app and the performance was subpar. | bayindirh wrote: | > I, and surely tons of others on this forum, am doing | this right now without issue. | | I personally run Teams, Spotify, Evernote and Discord, | but I close them as soon as finish working with them. So | _without issue_ is a bit of a stretch. Also These | applications glitch in a funny, agonizing and obscure | ways. They are non-deterministic blobs and this is not | good. | | > Sure it's not perfect, especially if you're on battery, | but most of the time it just doesn't matter to almost all | of their user base. | | Actually, when computing is moving on portables in an | ever increasing speed, this sounds bad. "It's a nice | application, but it just kills your mobility. It's not | important anyway, eh?" | | I don't think the approach of "we have a lot of | processing power and its processor is efficient anyway, | so let's abuse this" is a good way to approach software | development. | qbasic_forever wrote: | There is enormous pressure on web engines to improve | efficiency and decrease battery/power spend. With | browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better equipped | to actively manage and spin down idle tasks. Folks get | 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running tons of | Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc. all at | once. | | The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt app | that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire core | while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this is a | knock on complex native app development, not Qt). | bayindirh wrote: | > There is enormous pressure on web engines to improve | efficiency and decrease battery/power spend. | | Yes. However, these efficiencies are not always translate | to better Electron or WebApps on desktop applications. | | > With browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better | equipped to actively manage and spin down idle tasks. | | If your code doesn't allow these idle tasks to spin down, | all this work is effectively moot. | | > Folks get 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running | tons of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc. | all at once. | | This is possible because of the process suspension | capabilities of macOS. Not efficiencies of the | applications themselves completely. Evernote is the 6th | most power hungry application on my M1 MacBook Air, First | two is Zoom and Skype. Third one is Safari. I run Teams | and Discord only on my desktop, so I've no 12hr power | statistics for them for now. | | > The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt | app that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire | core while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this | is a knock on complex native app development, not Qt). | | Qt's QML simplifies this stuff tremendously. You can | write a whole UI in Qt in five lines with QML, without | thinking about any of this stuff, while keeping | everything native and nice. | philote wrote: | What is there to gain using the Electron versions of | Slack/Discord vs the web versions? | omniscient_oce wrote: | They have access to the file system and OS apis | qbasic_forever wrote: | They sit in the background and pop up alerts in your | native OS notification center. They can start up | automatically when you login. You can't accidentally | close them when shutting down a browser. That's about it, | honestly (Discord is a little more special since it needs | native access to see and capture games being played). | bayindirh wrote: | There are some well optimized Electron apps, I agree | however, they can be implemented in a much better and | more native way, without being harder to install and/or | update. Qt is a possible alternative. Similarly WxWidgets | can do it. | | As a big fan of compiled, so-called proper programming | languages (and high performance code developer to some | extent), I can tell that JVM is being bashed | unnecessarily. JVM _was_ heavy, I agree. Since the age of | Intel Core _i series_ , JVM is no longer heavy. | | I use one of the heaviest JVM applications regularly: | Eclipse. It can run in circles around any of the Electron | apps with similar memory usage, and I get much more bang | per MB in Eclipse. In ~1GB I can keep 3 IDEs open with | plethora of files, daemons, tools and integrations. We | have in-place updaters for a lot of platforms. Mac has | sparkle. Linux's AppImage can update itself seamlessly. | | There's no guarantee that an Electron application targets | everything out of the pipeline. We still don't have an | official Evernote client for Linux. Spotify for Linux is | a _volunteer project_ inside the company (which had a | very painful and bloody teething too). Slack just hogs | your computer. I didn 't look to resource usage of | Discord, but it's not light I presume. | | On the update department again, I've found out that | Office for Mac has updated itself _again_ and I didn 't | notice. Same for Firefox. | | So Electron is a nice solution, for some stuff, but it | leans too much on "Hardware is cheap, network is | reliable" paradigm, which is flat out wrong. | | It's very cheap to build on Electron, but user pays the | price. There's always the price. It all depends who's | going to pay it at the end of the day. | purpmint008 wrote: | I just use Chrome's "Create Shortcut" feature to make my | web-apps instead of downloading a bloated Electron app for | the same thing. | geoelectric wrote: | It's been controversial from the start. It's essentially | using a browser engine in the same way as Java uses the JVM | runtime, so all the performance arguments against that apply | to Electron too--probably even more so given that the JVM is | specifically optimized to be used that way whereas Blink/V8 | is not. | | Personally, I think the idea of a cross-platform application | runtime with GUI capabilities is a good one, browser-based or | otherwise. The only real problem is every app needing its | own, rather than using some sort of shared (but partitioned) | app subsystem based around a central browser engine. I think | the Chrome apps were supposed to be essentially that, but | didn't work out. That said, Chrome basically treats every tab | as a separate browser instance, so Electron really isn't as | bad as all that compared to a browser-based app. | | The problem is everyone compares it to native, not | acknowledging the dev's choice was probably Electron vs. no | support off the dev's main OS (usually Windows), rather than | Electron vs. native support for Mac or Linux. I still | remember when you had to have Windows to run most of the | interesting productivity and development apps, so I'm pretty | OK with extra overhead in exchange for the expanded support. | arkwin wrote: | I love this, I usually write my notes in Atom for school (I know | overkill) but I sometimes takes screen shots of slides for my | notes and never had a good way to view everything together.. this | works! | protomyth wrote: | What I would really like is an editor where I can fix the cursor | line on the screen and have the document move around that line. I | hate looking at the bottom of the window all the time when | writing long documents. | txutxu wrote: | Me too. | | What I do in my ~/.vimrc is: " Number of | lines (context) around the cursor " You may like 3, or | 5, or 10 " A high number keeps the cursor in the middle | of the editor set scrolloff=999 | | Then... it's always in the middle of the screen/window, even | when working at really big resolutions. | qbasic_forever wrote: | This is why I like rich text editors like google docs instead | of IDEs jammed with markdown extensions. Rich editors come from | a lineage of word-processing tools that are first and foremost | for writing paragraphs of text and content. They go out of | their way to make the experience of reading and writing | pleasant, not mechanical. | ducktective wrote: | In vim, set `scrolloff` to a large value. | | https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Keep_your_cursor_centered_vertic... | protomyth wrote: | close, but I want it to stay about a quarter of way down the | screen. | txutxu wrote: | This can be done playing with a number of lines... like 10 | or 15. And it will stay at such distance (in lines) from | the top or bottom... | | Don't know a way to set it to a percent, but could be nice | too, indeed. | ducktective wrote: | I think the percentage is do-able with some autocmd | shenanigans...even the link I posted has a snippet for | it. | | Changing that `/2` to a `*3/4` might work. | | https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Keep_your_cursor_centered_ver | tic... | y2bd wrote: | iA Writer has a "typewriter" mode that behaves like that. | alphachloride wrote: | I personally think the point of markdown is that any text editor | becomes distraction-free. Everything to do with structuring | content is inline with the text. How that structure is displayed | is deferred to the rendering context. | | I like the feature set, by the way. | c-smile wrote: | Well, Markdown is a form of WYSIWYG strictly speaking. Poor man | WYSIWYG if you wish. | | This * list item 1 * list item 2 | | mimics final representation of bullet list and so do pretty | much all other syntax constructs of Markdown. | | The only benefit it gives for the user (if to compare with | typical WYSIWYG) is a simplification of caret positioning. | | Consider these MD construct: | _italics_**bold** | | In MD you can easily put something in between these two words | or modify words themselves. But in case of "tru-WYSIWYG" you | will have this situation: | <i>italics</i><b>bold</b> | | with just one caret position between italics and bold. In fact | there are three possible caret positions (on edges of words and | between) but no WYSIWYG editor allows you to do that. | napworth wrote: | Does it handle Fountain syntax too? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-24 23:00 UTC)