Automattic / Automattic/simplenote-ios

Markdown live preview

Open
#305 2 comments 5 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
[feature] editor [feature] markdown [feature] preview feature request
Dominant language
Swift
Stars
2.2k
Forks
297
Avg merge
13h 25m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

Currently when markdown is enabled in the editor, the user has to flip to preview mode in order to see how their marked-up text renders:

![markdown_preview](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/154014/57785003-8102fd80-76f6-11e9-8e55-bf686bff5363.gif)

This dual-mode experience presents a few issues:
* Swiping left from the editor screen is not intuitive/obvious
* Many users continually flip back and forth between modes while editing
* (Subjective) Markdown markup doesn't look as nice as already-formatted text
* Users coming from more traditional editors (Notes.app, Word, etc) are not used to this
* The markup causes the user to lose focus on their content

So, my suggestion here is that we implement a live markdown preview where markup is rendered in real time. At the lowest levels, notes are still markdown...stored exactly as they are today. There are a few editors that already do this — a great example is [Typora](https://typora.io/).

Additionally, this new mode could be a global (and/or note-level) setting (on by default) that users can disable if they prefer the "classic" Simplenote editor experience.

Ref: https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-macos/issues/326

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Simplenote iOS editor and the referenced simplenote-macos issue 326 to understand the existing markdown and preview modes. Define how live rendering should behave while preserving markdown storage, then determine the scope of the global or note-level setting and validate the experience on iOS.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
swift
Domain
frontend, mobile
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.