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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I've made myself two editors recently:
https://wander.md - WYSIWYG editor that works on mac, iphone and iPad and has semantic versioning backend in.
https://original.me - fully native macOS editor that uses Apple Notes as backend.
those are ver interesting to build, but also way more possible. I think it would have take me years before.
I've been experimenting with using Markdown (in Typora) in place of Word, but it (and others I've looked at) have zero support for image positioning or sizing, or a way to have different (pre-defined) styles on different tables.
Which is a shame because I like keeping my documents in plain text, in version control and efficiently read by my LLMs. LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) for LaTeX is the closest to what I'm thinking of that I know of, but maybe something exists for Asciidoc or Typst.
I wrote my own wiki to use as a personal knowledge base to replace Dokuwiki because I wanted a simpler Markdown-based solution written in Python. I started it during the pandemic times and all of the code in there to date was written by hand. All of it was pretty easy except the CSS/layout parts which I'm just not very good at. It took months of free time to get it where I wanted.
I also recently created a day-to-day notes and daily planner app that's basically a bunch of markdown notes. I spent about a week of free time defining the problem, setting constraints, and refining with an LLM that wrote almost all of the code for me. I've been using it for months and it's working great.
The wiki uses Markdown because I browse it just as often as I edit and I appreciate some modicum of basic formatting. The daily notes app doesn't really _have_ to use markdown, I've just gotten accustomed to writing Markdown pretty much everywhere.
(These are on github, but I'm not posting the links here because I don't want to or care about promoting them.)
Writing is also a deeply personal exercise for many, and I can say from personal experience that the environment I write in, from the room/place I'm in to the color scheme of my editor, really matters sometimes.
I haven't found a need to build my own editor, but I can see how someone else would.
edit: Oh, electron?!
But Macdown is a universal binary? https://github.com/schuyler/macdown3000 So it should just keep working
YETANOTHER.md
YETANOTHERAGAIN.md
https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer <- 130mb to 3mb from Electron to Tauri
Whoops! Thanks for the warning. I'm out.
Shame, too. I've been looking for a new text editor. Someone else in this thread recommended SubEtha. I'll take a look there, instead. Happy to keep my Mac Electron-free.
Speed. Efficiency. UI consistency. Cross-program features that nearly every "framework" fails at.
On my macOS machines, I make an effort to only use native apps. I can't speak for what Apple ships with the OS, but AFAIK, everything I've added is native.
Perhaps it's just a placebo effect, but everything on my five-year-old personal M1 MacBook Pro feels just as snappy as the mixed bag on my two-year-old work M4 MacBook Pro.
> For perspective: at just 4 MB, MarkEdit is much smaller than Electron apps. Handling a 10 MB file with ease puts it ahead of TextKit-based editors. Performance-first editors built with Rust lack native features, while correctness alone rules out editors that rely on regex-based Markdown parsing.
[0]: https://github.com/MarkEdit-app/MarkEdit
Before anyone asks: "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" is a backronym, not the origin of the phrase.
The term is quite a bit older than today's tech bubble.
It came out of hotrod car modification clubs that specialize in Japanese brands. Some consider it pejorative. (See: "rice rocket.")
https://subethaedit.net