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?

  • talEnglish
    51·
    8 hours ago

    Emacs’s Markdown mode has two options for preview:

    • C-c C-c p (Control-C Control-C p) runs markdown-preview, which will open a preview in a new window

    • C-c C-c l runs markdown-live-preview mode, which will show an updated-as you edit preview next to the text.

    In addition to built-in functionality, in my emacs setup, I also personally bind C-c a k to run Make. In my init.el:

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-c a k") 'compile)

    That way, if you have any sort of project – which could hypothetically be a Markdown file – and a Makefile for it in the same directory, it’ll build it. An example Makefile:

    all: foo.pdf

%.pdf: %.md
	pandoc -f markdown -t pdf $< -o $@

    Editing foo.md in emacs and hitting C-c a k will regenerate the pdf using pandoc with that setup. It sounds like you’re familiar with pandoc.

    If you have evince running on foo.pdf, it’ll monitor changes to the displayed pdf file, and then just update its display if the file changes.