Automattic / Automattic/simplenote-macos

Markdown live preview

Open
#326 15 comments 38 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
[feature] editor [feature] markdown [feature] preview feature request
Dominant language
Swift
Stars
1.6k
Forks
172
Avg merge
11h 17m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

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/154014/57783461-c245de00-76f3-11e9-9b1f-2da90086ec21.gif)

This dual-mode experience presents a few issues:
* It's an extra step/click to get to preview mode
* 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.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue names no file, test, or entry point; start by locating the macOS editor and its existing preview-mode implementation. Done means markdown renders live while editing, notes remain stored as markdown, and the proposed setting can disable the behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
markdown, swift
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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