alt Hacker NewsThere must be something fascinating about writing Markdown apps - either it scratches an itch, or AI is really good at creating them. There's a flood of them on r/macapps and similar places.
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In recent years, I've written two!
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.)
yeah, it's easier to made them now then before.
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 thought it would compare to iA Writer, but misread
Probably a lot of both.
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.
didn't know about that, but when I looked around, most of them were paid and just didn't really scratch the itch. this really starte as a simple editor for writing blog posts
Abashedly raises hand as someone who's also written his own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's because it's effectively impossible to make a markdown authoring app that meets everyone's needs, and people tend to be picky about what they want in a writing environment. People have strong preferences about WYSIWYG, flavor of markdown (pandoc/quarto/GFM/etc), theming support, some want notes to be able to link to each other, etc. As an example, I require math notation support for basically everything I write which automatically rules out 90% of markdown editors for me.